Introduction

Android provides many ways to notify your user, including both visual and non-visual methods. Keep in mind, notifications distract your user, so it's a good idea to be very judicious when using any notification. Users like to be in control of their device (it is theirs, after all), so give them the option to enable and disable notifications as they desire. Otherwise, your user might get annoyed and uninstall your app altogether.

We'll start by reviewing the following non-UI-based notification options:

• Flash LED
• Vibrate phone
• Play ringtone

Then, we'll move on to visual notifications, including the following:

• Toasts
• AlertDialog
• ProgressDialog
• Status Bar Notifications

The recipes that follow will show you how to implement each of these notifications in your own applications. It's worth reading the following link to understand best practices when using notifications:

Note

Refer to Android Notification Design Guidelines at http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/notifications.html.