Chrome OS Will Soon get Android-like Notification Badges

Mobile operating systems like Apple's iOS have had notification badges for years, but it's not a feature that Android supported natively until recently. It's a welcome addition, and a new commit suggests it's coming to another Google operating system — Chrome OS — in the near future.

According to the commit in question, which was discovered by Chrome Story, Google's calling them "notification indicators", and an upcoming version of Chrome OS will add notification badges to shelf app icons throughout the operating system.

cros: Add Notification indicators for shelf app icons

This CL includes:
– New feature flag (omitting the chrome://flag for now per pm request)
– Added functionality to Shelf MVC with tests.
– Added new view to ShelfButton.
– Added new field to ShelfItem.

Flow:
– ShelfController now observes MessageCenter.
– ShelfController sends the Notification ID to the ShelfModel.
– ShelfModel updates the appropriate ShelfItem.
– ShelfView::OnShelfItemChanged handles updating the icons indicator.

About the two new maps in ShelfModel:
– We need the NotificationId->AppId map because when the Notification is deleted, we
lose the ability to look up the Notification's AppId.
– We need the AppId->NotificationId map so an app can look-up all of
its notifications.

Bug:801014

A related bug report suggests that the notification indicators appear next to apps pinned to the taskbar. There aren't any images of them in action yet, but they're are described as numbers or dots "in the top right corner of the image [that] represent an active notification." That certainly matches how things look with Android's Notification Dots feature, and it isn't unreasonable to assume they'll be similar.

A comment on the commit mentions that Chrome OS notification indicators will work on both Android applications and Chrome OS applications. Interestingly, there's another comment that says a piece of code "enables the touchable app context menus." Notification Dots on Android allow users to long press on icons icon to bring up App Shortcuts and see a concatenated version of the notification, and there's a good chance that notification badges on Chrome OS will work much the same way.

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Source: Chrome Story

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