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Android 11 groups your messages under a new Conversations notification section
If you’re like us here at Android Authority, you probably have multiple apps for communicating with people. Slack, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and regular ol’ text message alerts fill up our notification shade. With Android 11, though, things are about to get more organized.
In the first Developer Preview of Android 11, a new “Conversations” section is introduced to the notification shade. Here, your various messaging app alerts are all grouped together in one place giving them priority over other notifications lower down the list.
This new Conversations section creates three tiers of notifications in your shade: Conversations at the top, various other notifications in the middle, and silent notifications at the bottom.
Not only does this make your shade more organized, but it also brings new features that specifically apply to message apps. Long-pressing a notification brings up a secondary menu for that service. Here, you can tightly control not only notifications from that service but also service notifications from that particular user. For example, you could mark that user as a favorite to further prioritize their messages. You could also have their messages pop up in a conversation bubble (introduced in Android 10). You can also snooze or even fully mute that person.
Ostensibly, this would only apply to that user within that messaging app. Google is giving us a lot of control over who can contact us and how much priority they receive!
It’s not quite clear how Android 11 will choose which apps get grouped into Conversations. We will need to test this out more to see if there are any apps that should get grouped there but don’t, or vice versa.