If you've ever wondered whether an AI feature on your phone is doing anything useful, Ben Khalesi has probably asked the same question. He has covered AI and Android for Android Police since 2023, with Pixel, Galaxy, Google's apps, and the rest of the Android ecosystem never far behind. Ben is a lifelong geek who trained as an AI engineer and earned a bachelor's in IT, so when the industry announces something new, he's the one who wants to know how everything works behind the scene and what can be trusted.
Apple's version, Live Activities, launched in late 2022 and had a healthy roster of third-party apps within months.
Android's equivalent, meanwhile, is a ghost town in comparison, and that's embarrassing.
Quiz
8 Questions · Test Your Knowledge
Android 16 features Trivia challenge
Think you know Google's boldest Android update yet? Put your knowledge to the test.
FeaturesDesignSystemUpdatesAdaptive
01 / 8
Design
What is the name of the major visual design overhaul introduced with Android 16?
Correct! Material 3 Expressive is Google's sweeping new design language debuted with Android 16. It emphasizes bold colors, dynamic motion, and more personalized, emotionally resonant UI elements throughout the system.
Not quite. The answer is Material 3 Expressive. Google announced this as a significant evolution of Material You, focusing on bolder visuals, springy animations, and a design philosophy built around emotional engagement with the interface.
02 / 8
Updates
Android 16 marked a significant change to Google's release schedule. What was notable about its timing?
Correct! Android 16 broke Google's long-standing tradition of a Q3 release, arriving in Q2 instead. This earlier schedule was designed to give developers and manufacturers more lead time before the holiday device season.
Not quite. Android 16 was notable for arriving in Q2, earlier than the traditional Q3 fall release window. Google shifted the schedule to better align the platform release with the broader ecosystem's preparation timelines.
03 / 8
Adaptive
Which Android 16 feature dynamically adjusts app layouts based on the screen size and orientation of foldable devices?
Correct! Responsive Canvas is Android 16's approach to making apps automatically reflow and adapt their layouts for large screens, foldables, and tablets. It reduces the burden on developers to manually code separate layouts for every screen configuration.
Not quite. The answer is Responsive Canvas. This feature is central to Android 16's push for better large-screen and foldable support, intelligently adapting app content so it looks and works great regardless of how the device is folded or oriented.
04 / 8
System
Android 16 introduced a new system theme option that draws its color palette from what source?
Correct! Android 16 continues and refines the Monet dynamic theming engine, which samples colors directly from the user's wallpaper to generate a harmonious system-wide color palette. This means your UI tones shift automatically whenever you change your wallpaper.
Not quite. Android 16's system theming relies on the Monet engine, which samples the user's wallpaper to produce a cohesive dynamic color palette. This approach, introduced with Material You, ensures the entire system UI feels personalized and visually consistent with your chosen background.
05 / 8
Features
What health-related feature did Android 16 introduce natively into the platform for the first time?
Correct! Android 16 elevated Health Connect from a standalone app to a core platform API, meaning health and fitness data sharing between apps is now a first-class citizen of Android. This makes it easier for developers to build interconnected health experiences.
Not quite. The answer is Health Connect becoming a core platform API. By baking Health Connect directly into Android 16, Google ensures that fitness, wellness, and health apps can share data securely and consistently without requiring users to install a separate bridge application.
06 / 8
Features
Android 16 introduced improvements to predictive back gesture. What new capability was added?
Correct! Android 16 refined the predictive back gesture so users can peek at the destination and then cancel by releasing mid-swipe, with haptic feedback confirming the action. This gives users much greater confidence and control when navigating through apps.
Not quite. Android 16 added the ability to cancel a back gesture mid-swipe, complete with haptic feedback. This was a key usability improvement to the predictive back system, addressing user frustration about accidentally triggering navigation they didn't intend.
07 / 8
Performance
Which under-the-hood improvement in Android 16 was aimed specifically at reducing app startup times?
Correct! Android 16 expanded the use of ART baseline profiles, which are now pre-installed alongside app updates from the Play Store. This means apps can run optimized native code from the very first launch, dramatically cutting cold start times.
Not quite. The answer is ART baseline profile pre-installation during app updates. By bundling optimized profiles with app updates, Android 16 eliminates the warm-up period that previously caused apps to feel sluggish immediately after being updated or installed fresh.
08 / 8
Accessibility
What accessibility improvement did Android 16 bring to notifications for users with hearing impairments?
Correct! Android 16 gave users with hearing impairments granular control over flash and vibration alerts on a per-app basis. This means you can assign distinct vibration patterns or camera flash signals to specific apps, making it far easier to identify the source of an alert without sound.
Not quite. Android 16 introduced per-app customization of flash and vibration notification alerts. This level of granular control is a meaningful step forward for deaf and hard-of-hearing users, allowing them to distinguish between app alerts through unique tactile or visual patterns.
Challenge Complete
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What it takes to reach the status bar as a Live Update
The rules an app has to follow
Credit: Lucas Gouveia / Android Police
Live Updates is a highly privileged notification class baked into the OS. Developers who want in must ditch their custom designs and build with set templates instead.
The marquee options are ProgressStyle, introduced with Android 16, and MetricStyle, the fresh addition in Android 17, alongside three other styles for text and calls.
When an app clears the bar, the OS pins the update to the top of the notification shade and shows it prominently on the lock screen.
The Now Bar is Samsung's version of the same idea, a persistent lock screen surface for things happening right now.
Supporting it used to be effectively invite-only, limited to Samsung's own apps and a few partners.
One UI 8 removed that step by ingesting standard Android Live Updates, and the behavior carries through to the new One UI 9.
This means one platform API implementation reaches Google Pixel status bars and Samsung Galaxy lock screens at once. The reach argument has already been made by developers. They ignored it anyway.
Google can't even be bothered to use its own feature
Fourteen months for a stopwatch
Credit: Lucas Gouveia / Android Police | Darko 1981 / Studio Aline Fernandes / Shutterstock
Google Maps is the one bright spot. Active navigation pushes ETA and turn-by-turn directions into the status bar chip, and expands into a live trip progress card on the lock screen.
It's a poster child implementation, and for most of the first year, it was basically alone in Google's portfolio.
Google Wallet joined later with flight tracking, and the rest of Google's native lineup is patchy at best.
Google Clock finally joined the party in early August, when version 9.0 started showing running timers and stopwatches as a Live Update in the status bar, on the lock screen, and on the always-on display.
Sit with that timeline for a second. Google first showed this API in the Android 16 betas at the start of 2025, pitched it hard at I/O that May, and shipped it with Android 16.
It took Google more than a year to wire up a stopwatch in its own clock app. If the platform owner doesn't eat its own cooking, why would third-party developers bother?
Why are developers ignoring it?
Five templates and no room to move
Credit: Lucas Gouveia/Android Police
Blaming the empty room on lazy developers misses the structural issue. Google's eligibility rules are strict about form.
Apps have to declare a new permission called POST_PROMOTED_NOTIFICATIONS, granted at install rather than through a prompt, and they have to build the notification from one of five approved templates.
Custom designs are rejected outright. For apps that have already shaped their own notification look, that means throwing away the work.
The engineering work is also worse than on iOS. Apple can drive Live Activities entirely through a system-managed remote push service, with no persistent background process required to keep the UI current.
Android has no equivalent system-managed channel. The app has to wake up and rebuild the notification every time, which, for anything continuous, means keeping a foreground service alive.
If you're a developer, you're now looking at a different architecture with unpredictable background execution limits across manufacturers.
A lot of teams can't justify the spend, and even the ones that want to build it for iOS first.
The dominoes that have to fall
For Live Updates to move from novelty to expectation, a few specific dominoes have to fall.
Google has to wire up its own apps. The platform owner needs to prove the framework is reliable and worth looking at.
The bigger lever is pressure. Google could require Live Updates support to get top-tier featuring on the Play Store. It could deprecate legacy notifications and force everyone into the new system.
Right now, Live Updates is trapped in a feedback loop. Users don't look for it because nothing uses it, and developers don't build it because users don't look for it.
Someone at Google has to break that loop, and given that it took the company 14 months to put its own stopwatch in the status bar, I'm not holding my breath.
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