Android’s upcoming notification summaries could avoid the pitfalls of Apple Intelligence

Update 1, August 4, 2025 (03:30 PM ET): We discovered a new animation in the July 2025 Android Canary release that demonstrates Android’s upcoming notification summary feature. Take a look:

Original article, July 8, 2025 (08:20 AM ET): Notifications are meant to be helpful, but they can quickly become overwhelming. To address this, Apple introduced a notification summary feature in iOS, and Google is developing a similar tool for Android. While we still don’t know when the feature will launch, we’ve discovered new details in the latest Android 16 beta that reveal how it will function.

As we first reported in March, Google is working on a feature that will summarize your notifications, much like in iOS 18. However, Google seems to be taking a more focused approach, possibly to avoid issues that have plagued Apple’s implementation. Instead of summarizing everything, Android will only summarize “conversation notifications.” These are a specific type for messages that appear in a dedicated space in the notification panel, have their own section in the share sheet, and can be opened as floating bubbles over other apps.

Because this feature is limited to conversation notifications, it should only summarize direct messages and group chats, not news or promotional alerts. This approach would avoid the biggest pitfall of Apple’s version, which drew criticism for inaccurately summarizing news articles. However, it wouldn’t solve another major challenge: Google still can’t guarantee a perfectly accurate summary, even for conversations.

That’s because the feature uses AI to generate summaries. While generative AI is powerful, it isn’t perfect, which is why Android will warn users that summaries “may contain errors.” To improve accuracy, the feature will only process “longer messages” and “group conversations,” giving the AI more context and reducing the likelihood of mistakes. If you find summaries from specific apps unhelpful, you can disable them individually by navigating to Settings > Notifications > Notification summaries > Manage apps.

Hopefully, you won’t need to micromanage this feature, as Google is designing it to be conservative. For instance, we’ve learned that Android will only summarize notifications that contain between 25 and 200 words, with a cap of 50 summaries per day. Furthermore, summaries are generated three minutes after a notification is received, possibly to conserve resources or to not interrupt users as they’re reading it. Interestingly, Google is explicitly excluding Gmail for now, suggesting the company may be experimenting with opening up the feature to non-conversation messages. As the feature is still in development, these specific parameters could change before its final release.

Since the feature isn’t live yet, we don’t have a demo to show off, but we do know what it should look like. Based on these code changes, the summarized text will only appear when a conversation notification is collapsed, with the original content presumably shown when it’s expanded. The summary itself will be a maximum of three lines, appear in italics, and be preceded by the following icon:

(This article’s hero image contains a crude mockup of what the feature might look like.)

While that app is available on many Android devices, we suspect the feature will be limited to the handful of phones that support Gemini Nano, the on-device version of Google’s AI model. Given the privacy implications, it’s very likely this feature will use Gemini Nano to process notifications on-device. We’re guessing the feature will debut on the upcoming Pixel 10 series before it rolls out to older Gemini Nano-capable devices like the Pixel 8 and 9, but we don’t really know. We’ll likely learn more about Google’s rollout plans soon, and hopefully, it will land alongside the other AI-powered “notification organizer” feature.

What do you think of Android’s upcoming notification summary feature? Do you think it’ll be better than Apple’s version? Let us know in the comments below!