Google launched Android 16 back in June, and with it came a ton of features and updates. Usually, that’s all Google does until the next version, which is expected to be released in beta sometime in January or February 2026. That isn’t the case this time, as Google just announced several new features coming to Android 16 as a sort of mid-cycle refresh for the OS.
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As per the norm these days, a sizable percentage of the new features will be powered by AI and leverage Gemini’s ability to categorize and summarize data. The rest are extra features coming to apps like Google’s Phone and additional customizations you can use to personalize your phone even more.
Google posted not one, but two blog posts about what’s coming up, so you know it’s going to be good. To save you some clicks, here’s everything coming in the next feature-packed Android 16 update. The December Android 16 update should roll out to Pixel devices starting today (Tuesday, Nov. 2), with other Android devices getting the updates when their OEMs get around to it.
Now, Gemini can help make sense of your notifications.
Credit: Google
AI can manage your notifications
Two of the big changes are coming to notifications. The first one is pretty simple. Google will allow AI to summarize long notifications (such as multiple messages in a group text) into a short summary to let you know what happened when you were away. These summaries can take several texts and sum them up in a sentence or two, making them easier to scan through while checking them quickly. It seems as though this is specifically targeted at group chats with lots of messages, but it may work with other types of messages as well.
Credit: Google
The other big notification change is an organizer function. This is vaguely similar to how Gmail filters messages and looks about the same in practice. Your various notifications will be categorized into things like News, Promotions, and others, thus letting you check your notifications as you please based on what kind of stuff you want to see. It’s a small change, but as a writer who gets probably 55 emails a day, this is going to be an awesome feature for me.
Let your loved ones know its urgent.
Credit: Google
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