Enhanced Notifications Replaces Adaptive Notifications
Android 10 added Adaptive Notifications, a feature that used AI to adjust the order in which it arranged notifications. Android 12 changes to Adaptive Notifications and changes the name to Enhanced Notifications, though the difference is not obvious. Android 12 adds a feature called Enhanced Notifications. This has caused some confusion because Enhanced Notifications are effectively Adaptive Notifications with a few UI tweaks (which, because Android 12 is currently in beta, are subject to change). Android 12 users looking for the features of Adaptive Notifications will want to use Enhanced Notifications. Another source of confusion is the Adaptive Notifications Ranking toggle included in the developer mode. This is no longer present in the beta and presumably won’t appear in the final release of Android 12.
How to Use Android 12’s Enhanced Notifications
Here’s how to turn on the new Enhanced Notifications feature. The Enhanced notifications feature is now enabled. You likely won’t notice an immediate change, however. The feature is designed to manage your notifications without calling more attention to them, so it’s rather subtle. In other words, there’s no way to set Enhanced Notifications ranking or Adaptive Notifications ranking manually. Instead, the AI algorithm determines priority based on how often you use or dismiss notifications.
How to Manage Enhanced Notifications
The specifics of how Enhanced Notifications prioritizes your notifications are vague. There’s no setting in Android 12 to let you manually set how Google’s AI prioritizes your notifications. However, Android still offers detailed control over which notifications appear. Here’s how to change the notification settings for a specific app. The specific notification settings you see will depend on the app, though all apps offer an All notifications toggle. Turning this toggle off will block all notifications from that app. Below this master setting, you’ll see a list of app features that could generate a notification. Those that have generated a notification recently will include a label telling you how many notifications are sent each day. Each feature will have a toggle next to it. Turn the toggle off to disable notifications for that app feature. For example, in the screenshot below, there’s a toggle to disable incoming message notifications from the Messages app.
Should I Turn Enhanced Notifications Off?
You don’t have to use Enhanced Notifications. Turning them off will effectively revert to Android 11’s notification system. It’s hard to say whether you’ll notice a difference in either case. An immediate change wasn’t noticeable in our testing. However, AI features tend to improve over time, so there could be a more obvious difference after several months of using the Enhanced Notifications feature. There is one concrete reason you might want to turn Enhanced Notifications off. The feature warns it “can access notification contact, including personal information like contact names and messages.” The AI presumably uses this information to sort notifications better. For example, it might notice a text message looks like spam and remove it. However, privacy-minded Android users might find this warning ominous and decide to turn Enhanced Notifications off.
