Google Pixel’s notification summaries are better than the iPhone’s, but to what end?

This latest Pixel drop brought one of my biggest fears to Android: notification summaries. It’s something Apple botched in iOS 18 last year, and something I didn’t feel like Android needed given its top-tier notification management. After a week with the feature, though, I’m of two minds. Google is definitely doing this the “right” way, but does that mean I’m likely to leave this tool enabled for weeks to come? Unfortunately, not quite.

Let’s start with the good. In many ways, Google has clearly learned from a year’s worth of bad press scattered around Apple’s implementation of this feature. That’s an interesting case study; Apple tends to be the company that is “late” to the party, with the excuse that any time it is late to something, it gets it right on the first try. That was absolutely untrue with notification summaries, given their general bugginess, inaccuracies that bounced between hilarious and horrifying, and months of missing…