Starting from the left, you can see in the first screen that the notification settings for our app displays the notification settings for our application. From here the user can:

Block all notification channels for our app. This means that notifications from our application will never be shown on the users device

If supported, the user can state whether or not our applications notifications should be shown as badges on the Home app

The notification categories that exist for our application. From here the user can toggle these to be enabled or disabled

The next screen (in the middle) can be accessed once the user selects a notification category from the first screen. From here the user is able to:

Block all notifications from our app that come from this channel

Display notifications from this channel within the Home app, if supported

And as shown in the final screenshot, the user can also set the importance of notifications from this channel. The option selected here will state how they want to be prompted when a notification is received.

We also have the ability to group notification channels into separate groups. This is so that we are able to have the same notification channels across multiple application modes.

For example, my application may support Personal and Business mode, or Child and Parent mode — this allows us to give the option to manage notification settings across multiple groups.

These are displayed in the same place as our notification channels, except just separated into their corresponding group.

On older versions of Android (pre-O) these new features will be completely ignored, so we don’t have to worry about current implementations breaking.

Now we know a little more about what notification channels are, I think it’s time we look at how we can implement them into our application!