Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Samsung’s One UI 8 will enhance its Live Notifications feature by adopting Android 16’s new “Live Updates” API for broader third-party app support.
- This new API allows any app to create live, ongoing notifications, a major improvement from the previous version limited to mostly first-party Samsung apps.
- The feature is currently available in the One UI 8 beta behind a developer flag but is expected to be enabled for everyone in the final stable release.
When Samsung released One UI 7 earlier this year, it introduced Live Notifications, its take on Apple’s Live Activities. These notifications make ongoing activities more visible on the lock screen and notification panel, but they launched with one major downside: only a handful of apps, mostly from Samsung itself, could create them. That’s changing in the upcoming One UI 8 update.
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Since One UI 8 is based on Android 16, it can leverage a new underlying feature called “Live Updates,” which offers similar functionality to Live Notifications but can be used by any third-party app. Thanks to the latest beta, we’re already getting a sneak peek at what that will look like in action.
At Google I/O, Google confirmed that Samsung will integrate Live Updates into its Now Bar alongside Live Notifications. The company even shared a short animation showing what an Uber Eats notification will look like when expanded from the Now Bar.
Following the release of One UI 8 Beta 3, my colleague Zachary Kew-Denniss spotted a new developer option called “Live notifications for all apps.”
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
After toggling it, Live Updates from compatible apps began appearing in One UI’s status bar and Now Bar just like Live Notifications. Currently, there aren’t any publicly available apps that support Live Updates, so I had to use Google’s sample app to test the feature.
Given that this is a beta, we’re not surprised to see Live Updates support locked behind a developer option. However, we would be surprised if this remains the case when the stable version of One UI 8 rolls out. After all, Google already confirmed Samsung will support Live Updates, so it would be strange to require users to flip a developer switch for the feature to work as intended.
