Right after Google launched Android 11 for Pixel phones, the software giant released Android 11’s source code to the Android Open Source Project(AOSP) website. Going through the source code, XDA’s Editor-in-Chief Mishaal Rahman has spotted the presence of ‘Deep Press’ for notifications.
In case you didn’t know already, Google added ‘Deep Press’ functionality with the second Pixel feature drop earlier in March. The feature uses software to judge the user’s firm presses. It lets you open the context menu in Pixel Launcher, Google Photos, and Google Drive. Google is now expanding the scope of this feature to notifications.
With this change, bundled notifications expand when you deep/firm press them. If you press it long enough, it will take you to the app notification controls. Here, you can mute certain channels or set the priority of the incoming notification.
According to Android Police, the feature is working as intended on Pixel 4 and Pixel 4a. Some users on Twitter report the presence of the feature in Pixel 3a XL running Android 11 as well. The feature may come to other phones with Android 11 as well.
While it is good that Google is providing more options, I’m not quite sure why the company is making a redundant feature addition. Expanding bundled notifications is currently quite straightforward and requires just a simple swipe down gesture.
In my opinion, this whole long-press expand feature may be a hit or miss unless the ML algorithm working behind the scenes gets really good at it with superior precision. I hope the company doesn’t discontinue the ability to swipe down to expand notifications in favor of this fancy deep press implementation in future iterations of Android.
