# Notification Channels in Android Oreo

DevFeed: [Notification Channels in Android Oreo](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/notification-channels-in-android-oreo-25840.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://segunfamisa.com/posts/notification-channels-android-o>)

Author: Segun Famisa

Published: 2018-02-06T20:20:02Z

Content type: tutorial

Language: en

Sources: [Segun Famisa](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/segun-famisa.md>)

Topics: [Android](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/android.md>), [SDKs](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/sdks.md>), [API](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/api.md>), [Gradle](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/gradle.md>)

Tags: [android](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/android.md>), [api](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/api.md>), [app](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/app.md>), [gradle](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/gradle.md>), [sdk](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/sdk.md>)

## AI overview

This tutorial explains Android Oreo notification channels, including their categories, user-controlled settings, runtime creation, unique IDs and names, importance levels, and channel groups. It states that apps targeting API 26 need to implement notification channels to continue sending notifications.

## Source excerpt

In (not-so) recent news, Google is going to enforce that all apps target SDK 26 (Android Oreo) by late 2018, in order to ensure security and improved performance in apps. You can read more about the announcement here. Now, it's pretty easy to target API 26, but there's no gurantee that your app will function as it used to by just changing the targetSdkVersion value in your build.gradle file. This post looks specifically at one of the new things introduced in Android Oreo, and how targeting API 26 will affect your app, and notifications - notification channels (or categories). TL;DR Your app will stop sending notifications to the users if you target API 26 and you don't implement notification channels. What are Notification Channels? In Android O, notification channels are somewhat like groups or categories of notifications - say you're building a social networking app, the channels can be "activity" - likes, or comments on your posts, "messages", etc. In fact, in the settings of your app, the user sees channels as "categories" as seen in the screenshot below. With the introduction of notification channels, users can get a fine control of what they want to be notified about. They can specifically turn off notifications for a certain channel, specify the importance as well as the preferred sound for a particular category of notifications and determine whether or not to override DND (Do not disturb) Implementing Notification Channels Creating notification channels These notification channels are created at runtime, so they can be dynamically changed to fit the requirements of your the user. For example, if a user subscribes to group chat for example, you can create a channel matching that particular group, and when they leave the group, you can remove the notification channel. So how then does one add channels to notifications? At the simplest level, one needs to create a channel with a unique name and ID and a level of importance. The uniqueness of the name and ID onl