Android 17’s new App Lock might stop your notifications from spilling secrets
Latest Android Canary reveals Google plans to mask notifications by replacing their content with generic placeholder text.
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Android 17 is rumored to include a native App Lock feature.
- New code strings suggest that locked app notifications will show generic “New message” or “New notification” text instead of the usual notification content.
- It’s unclear whether the app name and icon in the notification will also be hidden.
We’re slowly and steadily marching towards the release of Android 17, which could come with new features such as a long-awaited native App Lock solution. We already have a decent idea of how this rumored feature would work, but there were a few unknowns, one of which was how the feature would handle incoming notifications from locked apps. Thanks to the Android Canary 2601 release, we have an answer.
Within this new Android Canary build, we’ve spotted new strings that indicate how App Lock would handle notifications from locked apps:
Code
<string name="app_locked_new_notification">New notification</string>
<string name="app_locked_notification_message">New message</string>
From these strings, we can infer that locked apps will still receive visible notifications, but the notification content will not be visible.
For instance, if a user has locked the Google Messages app with App Lock and receives a message, they will only see a “New message” notification in their notification shade, instead of a notification with the message contents. For non-messaging notifications, the text will change to “New notification” without revealing the contents of the notification.
For now, it’s not immediately clear if the name of the app and its icon will be visible. If other OEM implementations are any indication, the name of the app and its icon will likely be visible too, as they would help determine which app has received the notification in the first place.
None of this is final until Google officially releases the feature. We’ll keep you updated if we spot more changes.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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