Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 gives your status bar more breathing space

Android 17 QPR2 Beta 4 landed over the weekend, and we’re gradually learning what’s new with the update. In July, we uncovered evidence in an Android Canary release suggesting Google could allow users to hide system and notification icons from the status bar. We can now confirm that the freshly released beta includes two entries for this particular feature directly in the Settings page.

We last saw progress on this feature in Android Canary 2608 earlier this month, when strings revealed exactly what could be hidden from the status bar. However, we never quite knew what the new options would look like. That’s changing courtesy of the latest Android 17 QPR2 beta.

There are two ways to access the new Status bar option. One through Settings > Notifications and the other through Settings > System. The functionality remains the same regardless of where you access it. Meanwhile, the Status bar page is pretty understated, with the options split between Notification icons and System icons.

As we learned with Android Canary 2608, users can set notifications to All, Priority only, or None. The system icons, on the other hand, let you hide/display the mute and vibration icons, along with the battery percentage. Notably, the vibration and battery percentage icons can already be hidden from view on Pixel phones via the Sound & vibration and Battery settings pages, respectively.

While this may be new to Google’s Pixel phones, Samsung, OnePlus, and others already offer granular control over the visibility of status bar icons. So this isn’t a groundbreaking addition to Android by any stretch. Still, Pixel users will welcome the fact that their status bar can now look cleaner by removing some common icons from view.

On top of these new visibility options, the newly released beta also makes it easier to access the Voice Broadcast feature and introduces a new dashboard to manage the AI agents installed on your smartphone.