The Google+ app for Android has an update rolling out in the Play Store that brings support for Android Oreo’s new Notification Channels feature. The update is version 9.20 for those keeping score. It was released yesterday and should come to everyone who has the app installed over the course of the next few days.
For those who aren’t familiar, Notification Channels are built into apps by developers as a way to allow you greater control over the notifications you see and how you are notified. They bring granularity to notifications and not just a general “on or off” type functionality. That’s an over simplification but you get the idea.
With this update to Google+, you have three channels now available: App Status Updates, New Activity, and Content. You can now customize the notifications for the app to different levels depending on how you set it up. To setup the channels, go to Settings>Notifications then select the Google+ app. There you will see your stock notification settings which you can tap to adjust.
While it is great to see Google adding Notification Channels to Google+, it is a bit disappointing. G+ has a lot of granularity built into it already for how you are notified and while these three top level channels are good, support for more granular notifications that are already built into the app would have been better.
Finally, if you have multiple accounts for which you use G+, you can set up these notification channels for each account individually and they can be different.
Look for the OTA to hit your install of Google+ at some point this week. For those who don’t have it installed, you can download it free from the Play Store.
