Android 16 offers an early taste of Live Updates, but its best features will have to wait

What is going on with the availability of Live Updates for notifications in Android 16?

Jun 11, 2025 - 00:00

Android 16 offers an early taste of Live Updates, but its best features will have to wait

Live Updates introduce a new way for Android to let apps communicate ongoing processes.
With today’s release of Android 16, we start to see support for apps featuring progress-centric notifications.
Full Live Updates support, where these notifications are actually handled differently by the system, will not arrive until later this year.

Google just released Android 16 stable, and while there’s a lot going on there, there’s also a fair amount that we’re not getting just yet. Google’s delivering plenty of both new system- and app-level features, but there’s a lot it’s announced that’s still a work in progress. We can try the new Desktop Mode experience in beta right now, for instance, but it won’t be coming to Android 16 users at large until a future update. And you’ve probably heard a lot about Material 3 Expressive already, and while we’ve seen lots of early previews, it’s really not hitting Android 16 with full force until QPR1 lands.

While those are the big ones, we’re also aware of lots of other Android 16 changes that Google’s been talking about, but unless you’ve been paying particularly close attention to all the developer-focused minutiae, it could be easy to lose track of exactly what functionality we can expect, and when. And that’s exactly what we’d like to set the record straight on when it comes to Android 16’s support for Live Updates.