The second, and arguably the most noticeable visual change, is movement of a notification’s big icon from the left to the right. Functionally, this has no impact. All I can do is guess at the reasoning behind it until a member of Google’s team offers their perspective.

Notification on Marshmallow on top and Android N below. Note the shift in big icon from left to right, explicit mention of which app fired the notification with name and icon on top.

As I said in the analysis of the functional changes, it looks like Google wanted to increase the likelihood of users performing actions directly from the notification tray versus opening apps. My assumption is that moving the big icon could be related, with the desire on Google’s side to make users focus on the content of a notification versus the icon itself.

It would be interesting to see if this works. In theory, I imagine users saw big icons, quickly related it to the app firing the notification, glance at the notification content (at best), and simply click on it or swipe it away. Whether this functions well in practice is questionable: ultimately, mobile users do want to simply glance at small bits of information first, and engage if they are interested.

In fact, I’m genuinely surprised at the decrease in iconography and increase of text in notifications on Android N in general: the notification actions no longer use them as well. As for increase in text, previously information regarding which app fired a notification was shown only if the user explicitly set the app icon to be used or mentioned in text. Timestamps for the notification are also now far more prominent.

This, if it does make the production version of Android N, would be a major shift in Android design which has always seen an emphasis on iconography and simplicity. On the whole, Android N notifications feel far more cluttered in comparison with the past styling, with minimal text.