Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google is continuing its work to split up Android’s notifications and Quick Settings panels.
- The media player now appears at the top of the Quick Settings panel, and you can now switch between pages by swiping.
- The new split notifications and Quick Settings panels aren’t live yet in Android 16 Beta 3, and we don’t know when this new design will roll out.
The third beta of Android 16 is finally here. Being the Platform Stability release, Beta 3 will be very close to the stable update we’ll see in June. This means no major changes are expected between now and then, which is disappointing for those anticipating significant design changes. Google will revamp Android’s user interface, though, and the latest beta includes several improvements to the new split notifications and Quick Settings panels. Here’s your latest look at Android’s upcoming notification and Quick Settings panel redesign.
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To provide context, we’ve been tracking Google’s efforts to overhaul the notifications and Quick Settings panels since last September. Google aims to separate these panels into distinct pages, a change that’s intended to create more space for notifications and Quick Settings tiles. Consequently, Google is also making Quick Settings tiles resizable to display more of them at once.
However, a few weeks ago, it became apparent to us that this new design wouldn’t be ready for Android 16. We came to this conclusion due to the presence of several unfinished aspects. For instance, while Google is working on light mode compatibility, the panels still suffer from significant text contrast problems. The company is also refining how certain Quick Settings tiles expand, but this implementation remains incomplete. Crucially, the media player was still absent from the panels, and there was no intuitive way to switch between them.
With the latest code changes in Android 16 Beta 3, however, Google has addressed several of these issues. The media player is now prominently placed at the top of the notifications and Quick Settings panels, and there are now two new ways to switch between them. First, you can simply tap the chips at the top left and right to open the respective panels. Second, swiping down on the left side opens the notifications panel, while swiping down on the right opens the Quick Settings panel.
Personally, I find the new swipe gesture unintuitive. Some people will likely try to switch between panels by swiping left or right, as that’s how several other Android-based OSes with split panels operate. As a result, it’s possible some people will struggle to adapt to Google’s method.
Of course, this assumes that Google doesn’t make any further changes, which is quite possible given the split panel design is still in development. Google will likely continue to refine the new panels to not only address the issues I described earlier but also add new features. In Android 16 Beta 3, for example, Google also made the Quick Settings panel vertically scrolling, allowing you to fill up the entire screen with tiles. It also added clear plus and minus buttons to each tile in the edit menu, making it easier to add or remove tiles from the panel.
While it’s very unlikely that Google will release this new design in the initial Android 16 stable release, it could still arrive later this year in a quarterly update for Android 16. We’ll continue to monitor future Android builds for any further changes to Android’s notification and Quick Settings panels.
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