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It is no longer surprising to see Android features coming to Chrome OS. Chromebooks and Android tablets are in a way cousins now, if you know what I mean! So, I am here with news about an Android Oreo feature that is making its way into Chrome OS.

According to this code commit, “Notification indicators” are coming to Chrome OS. Looking at the description and comments within the committed files, this indeed is the notification badges feature from Oreo.

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The description:

cros: Add Notification indicators for shelf app icons This CL includes:

– New feature flag (omitting the chrome://flag for now per pm request)

– Added functionality to Shelf MVC with tests.

– Added new view to ShelfButton.

– Added new field to ShelfItem. Flow:

– ShelfController now observes MessageCenter.

– ShelfController sends the Notification ID to the ShelfModel.

– ShelfModel updates the appropriate ShelfItem.

– ShelfView::OnShelfItemChanged handles updating the icons indicator. About the two new maps in ShelfModel:

– We need the NotificationId->AppId map because when the Notification is deleted, we

lose the ability to look up the Notification’s AppId.

– We need the AppId->NotificationId map so an app can look-up all of

its notifications. Bug:801014

This bug is private, so that is a good sign too. Looking at code comments we see more. Here are some comments from a testing app for this feature:

// Tests that pinned apps pick up their notifications if they were recieved

// before the app existed on the shelf. // Add an example app, but don’t pin it. // Add a notification for the app.

// Pin the app after the notification posts. // Un-pin and re-pin the app. // Test that the notification persists.

So, from the way it looks, these notification indicator will be for apps pinned to the taskbar.

How Will This Look Like?

We do not have a screenshot yet, but here is a code comment I could find:

Draws an indicator in the top right corner of the image to represent an

active notification.

Android Apps Only, or Chrome OS Apps Too?

We would need more details for this, but from this comment, I would assume this will be for both:

// If the notification is for an ARC app, return early.

// TODO(newcomer): Support ARC app notifications.

Touchable App Context Menus

One more thing. This file has an interesting code comment:

// Enables the touchable app context menus.

Is that yet another Android feature? Like this:

So, what do you guys think? Let me know in comments!