- Google Maps appears to be the first app to add support for Android 16’s new Live Updates feature.
- Live Updates are a special class of notifications that display progress-centric information and can appear in the status bar as chips.
- Android 16 Beta 2.1 is the first version to add support for Live Updates, but the feature isn’t fully implemented yet.
One of the key features of the upcoming Android 16 release is Live Updates, a feature that allows progress-centric notifications to be displayed prominently in the status bar, notifications panel, lock screen, and always-on display. When Google first announced the feature in January, it wasn’t ready for developers to test. With the most recent Android beta release, however, the Live Updates feature is finally here, and Google Maps is already ready for it.
Late last week, Google released Android 16 Beta 2.1, an incremental, bug-fixing update on top of Android 16 Beta 2. Typically, these minor updates don’t contain any new features, but to our surprise, Beta 2.1 actually brought the new Live Updates feature, at least partially. When I ran the demo app that I used for our first look at the Live Updates feature, I noticed that the app’s notifications were being shown as status bar chips. They were also displayed prominently in the notifications panel above even priority conversations (but below the media panel), making them hard to miss.