The upcoming Android 16 will feature Live Updates, enabling notifications to pop up on the Lock Screen, status bar, always-on display, and notifications panel. These notifications are not your typical alerts; they provide real-time updates on the progress of specific tasks. Last week, Google rolled out Android 16 Beta 2.1, an incremental update that typically wouldn’t introduce anything groundbreaking.
Surprisingly, this update does include the Live Updates feature, with Google Maps being the first app to take advantage of it. The Live Updates status bar chip is distinctly green, clearly identifying it as a Google Maps notification. In addition to the green background, the chip features the Google Maps icon, ensuring users know exactly where the Live Update information is coming from.
With this chip, users can view details such as the time until the next turn, estimated time of arrival (ETA), and potentially other turn-by-turn navigation data. Since the chips are compact, they don’t display extensive information. However, tapping on one expands it into a panel, allowing users to see more details without needing to swipe down from the top of the screen.
The expanded panel reveals the distance remaining to the destination, how far away the destination is, the ETA for the next turn, and the time until that turn. I’ve tested this feature on my Pixel 6 Pro running Android 16 Beta 2.1. Besides Google Maps, Live Updates will also track the progress of food deliveries from select platforms, show the distance to your Uber or Lyft ride, monitor countdown timers, and provide updated scores from various sports events.
Remember, our current view is somewhat restricted as we are using Android 16 Beta 2.1, with the final stable release of Android 16 anticipated in June.
For those iOS users, if Live Updates rings a bell, that’s because it closely resembles the Live Activities feature, which provides real-time progress updates on the Dynamic Island and Lock Screens for iPhone users.
