Google prepares a polished look for Android’s Live Updates

Google introduced Live Updates with Android 16 last year. In Google’s own words, Live Updates are a special class of notifications that provide real-time activity updates via a horizontal progress bar. The floating notification expands around the selfie camera in a fashion somewhat similar to Live Activities in iOS. While the feature was initially proposed for food delivery or ride-hailing apps, Google later began testing it for Google Maps, just to show you the different segments of the route split by traffic density. With the latest Android Canary build, we’re seeing more updates to the notification.

We’ve recently spotted a new design for live updates. There are no major changes, but the update appears to be intended to make the progress bar more prominent, and these changes are consistent across the home screen, notification shade, and the lock screen, as you can see below:

With these improvements, the app’s icon is now positioned at the top instead of the left. This frees up space for the horizontal bar to expand to the entire width of the Live Updates tile. Additionally, we now see a more prominent button with text, encased in a pill-shaped border. Previously, we saw just text for buttons. However, the button is not filled in, so this may not be the final form.

Other visual aspects, such as colors or the thickness of the progress bar, remain unchanged. The change now appears to be widely rolling out in Android Canary, but it’s difficult to comment whether it will make it to the upcoming Android 17 beta, and if Google plans to change it further before a wider release.