You know you hit those notifications and nothing happens until a minute or two has passed? Twitter was guilty of this, but there are still tons of apps that exhibit this behavior. Google is looking to make this a thing of the past on Android 12, by banning apps from using notification trampolines. This should effectively ban slow loading notifications, and the change is already having an effect on apps on Android 12 today.

Trampolines are typically used by apps that don’t open their own activity when you tap a notification, like when you share links with yourself through an app such as Pushbullet, and tap the notification to open the website instead of the app. Google also uses this method for its own “Send to your devices” feature in Chrome. To save users a bad wait experience, Google is ready to discontinue apps that rely on this method and is already toasting that the implementation will go away once Android 12 is stable. Oddly enough, Chrome’s own implementation is already completely halted, while Pushbullet users only get a warning message.

We spoke with the developers of Pushbullet, who confirmed they are using what could be considered a trampoline. However, since Pushbullet notifications are often only supposed to take you to the browser, there is no reason to start the Pushbullet app just to kill it right after redirecting users to the requested website. There may be a way around the problem by using the PendingIntent class as suggested in the Android documentation, but only rigid tests will tell. Either way, the developers have confirmed to us that they will be implementing all the necessary changes to support Android in the future.

While the new requirement may make some activities more time-consuming for developers, ordinary people will likely be happy that they no longer have to wait for their phone to do something after pressing a notification.

To learn more about the launch of Android 12, see our announcement article detailing what’s new here. If you want to install Developer Preview on your own device, find out how in our Android 12 download guide.