Google appears to be toying with a new take on notification icons in the status bar which, instead of the current look, would use the full-color app icons from your Android homescreen.
The Android status bar is one of the many things that set Google’s OS apart from iOS, in part because it shows a preview of the notifications you have before you swipe the full menu down. It’s handy functionality that doesn’t get in the way, but a new design tweak might make it a bit more of an eyesore.
As spotted by Android Authority, a latent experiment in Android 15 swaps out the existing notification icons in the status bar for ones that match what you’d find on the homescreen. These can be full-color or monochrome, but in both cases they look pretty rough as it stands today.
The full-color example leads to a bunch of circular icons with tiny little symbols for each app, while the monochrome example shared leaves multiple icons basically invisible. The same designs also apply to the always-on display and to the notifications themselves, with the latter actually working quite well with the full-color version.
Whether you like this change or not, it’s currently just a test, and not something that Google is definitely moving forward with. We’ll have to wait and see if the company ever decides to make this the actual behavior in Android.
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