60.9 Bundled Notifications

If an app has a tendency to regularly issue notifications there is a danger that those notifications will rapidly clutter both the status bar and the notification drawer providing a less than optimal experience for the user. This can be particularly true of news or messaging apps that send a notification every time there is either a breaking news story or a new message arrives from a contact. Consider, for example, the notifications in Figure 60-13:

Figure 60-13

Now imagine if ten or even twenty new messages had arrived. To avoid this kind of problem Android allows notifications to be bundled together into groups.

To bundle notifications, each notification must be designated as belonging to the same group via the setGroup() method, and an additional notification must be issued and configured as being the summary notification. The following code, for example, creates and issues the three notifications shown in Figure 60-13 above, but bundles...