Google
With a slew of new features announced today for Pixel devices, Android is marking a brand new cadence for the world's most widely used operating system. Features have already been decoupled from version updates for some time, but Google says they'll be more frequent from here on out. Included in this update are some fun, new ways to customize your Android phone, such as the ability to set custom app icon shapes and to force a dark mode for apps that don't include one. But one feature in particular will ring warning bells for people on the iPhone side of the aisle.
Since it's from Google, the update naturally includes some dubious-sounding AI features for Android. The two marquee additions are notification summaries, which will condense information into a short description, and notification organization, which batches notifications together into subcategories. There's only one question: who's asking for this? Okay, one more question. Is it really that difficult to read your notifications? Actually, here's a third. Do you really want Google processing all of your alerts through its AI servers?
Tech aficionados may remember AI notification summaries from last year's iOS 18, but not for a good reason. Android is repeating one of the most embarrassing features Apple has ever shipped to its smartphones. The reasons why this is being added are unclear, too, since notifications are much more well managed on Android than they are on iOS. It's certainly a fact that Google has a much more advanced AI platform than Apple, and judgement should be reserved until summaries can be tested. Even so, it's hard to imagine that anyone was clamoring for this, and even harder to believe that it will see widespread adoption. Here's why.
iPhone notification summaries were a minor disaster — will Android learn?
Apple
We can only hope Google has learned some valuable lessons from Apple when it comes to AI notification summaries. Whether or not Google's implementation is better, that failure will be fresh in many people's minds. When the feature debuted on iOS 18 last year, it wasn't long before it became a meme. Some users quickly realized that the summaries were often confusing. In other instances, notifications got paraphrased by Apple Intelligence in ways that were equally horrifying and hilarious. Summaries were eventually pulled in a rare admission of defeat from Apple, only for the controversial feature to be reintroduced with iOS 26 this year.
For some iPhone owners, notification summaries were merely garbled nonsense. "Shocking reel shared; only dresses one man; loves bad bunny and speaks Spanish," read a condensed Instagram notification delivered to one Android Authority writer. However, other notifications were equal parts horrifying and hilarious. Over at Ars Technica, one writer was delivered a notification reading, "Dangerous park contraption, parents frantically run over toddlers." Most memorably, a reporter at The Verge received the ominous warning, "10 or more people detected at Front Entrace," while the editor-in-chief was warned, "Multiple people at Front Door, Back Door, and Driveway." In both cases, iOS had compiled dozens of security app alerts into a single summary.
Google has a much larger head-start in the AI race than Apple, and its flagship Gemini model is considered competitive with ChatGPT and other top dogs. It's therefore unlikely that its notification summaries will fail quite as spectacularly as Apple Intelligence's. But that brings us to a larger question. Why does anyone need notification summaries in the first place, and how much of your data will Google need for them?
Notification summaries feel pointless and privacy violating
Google
Even if Google's notification summaries for Android 16 work flawlessly, who was asking for them in the first place? The thing about notifications is that they're already designed to be glanceable. Sure, you might have a few friends in group chats who send you reams of texts throughout the day, or a boss who sends needlessly wordy emails. But it's not hard to pick up the gist of a message just by peeking at it from your notification shade. If it's important, you dive in immediately, and if not, you wait for later. That behavior won't be affected by having the messages summarized.
Everything else is already summarized. How much more condensed can you make a notification from Uber informing you that your car is five minutes away? Can a weather alert or news headline really be condensed any further? There are certainly ways to improve the notification experience on Android. For example, junk notifications continue to multiply, but summarizing them won't make them go away. The new AI notification organizer might help more in that regard — speaking of which, both of these features involve privacy concerns.
Google is notoriously hungry for user data, especially when it comes to AI. After reading the concerning Gemini privacy policy, you shouldn't ever put information into Gemini that you wouldn't want to become public. As it pertains to these new Android features, we have no idea whether Google will retain your sensitive notification data. We reached back out, but didn't get an answer by press time. It's safe to assume your data will be processed in some capacity unless these features can be run on-device. So, to reiterate, who asked for this?
