“Never” is a strong word, but so are my feelings about this potential Android 16 change. This week, my colleague Mishaal Rahman revealed that Google is working on an interesting (read: horrible) redesign of Android’s notifications and Quick Settings drop-down menu. The change would separate these into two menus: notifications that are still accessible with a one-finger swipe-down and Quick Settings, which require a two-finger swipe gesture.
My initial gut reaction to this change was a loud “NOOOOOOOO” that resonated across the internal Android Authority Slack channels. That was followed by a few GIFs of table flipping and exploding head emojis and my colleagues’ pile-ups ranging from, “This is the worst day in the history of Android. I can’t believe this,” to some colorful expletives that my boss would fire me if I repeated here. Suffice it to say, we are not fans of this.