One of the biggest changes to Android notifications over the years is the ability for them to expand and collapse. Most of the time they come in collapsed to save space but using Xposed Framework we can easily automatically expand incoming notifications.
Android’s notification system has evolved over the years to a mixture of being both aesthetically pleasing and functional. This started with the switch to Material Design where notifications were now displayed in a card format. Google has touched on the notification system with each each update since Lollipop but not everyone is happy with some of the changes that have been made.
For example, there are a lot of people who like that we have actionable buttons for notifications, but are then displeased when those buttons are hidden.
If a notification has actionable buttons to them and they are hidden when they get sent to you, this is because they are being automatically collapsed. You can tap on the top third of the notification to expand it and reveal those buttons while also revealing the whole notification itself. Google does this to save space but some people would rather have these buttons visible at all times. They would also like to have the full notification in view at all times too.
This is where Xposed Framework comes into play with the GravityBox module. So to change how your device displays notifications then you’ll want to have these two Android modifications installed before you begin with the tutorial below.
Auto Expand Notifications
- Launch the GravityBox application
- Tap the Statusbar Tweaks option
- Tap the Notification Drawer Style option
- Toggle the Expand All Notification option on
Explanation
While OEMs such as Google and Samsung may implement a feature in a certain way on your device, the beauty of Android is that you don’t have to keep it that way. Instead, you can choose to change the default behavior of a specific feature thanks to the various mods that are released by community developers. The volunteers over at XDA put in countless hours of work to create some of the things that we have available and most don’t even charge a penny to use them.
This is why I always suggest donating to a developer of a mod that you find yourself using a lot. Even the smallest donations go a long way. So what we’re doing here today is changing the default behavior of Android’s notification system. If you’re on a recent version then you have likely noticed notifications can either be collapsed or expanded. Google likes to automatically expand the latest notification but older ones can be collapsed and clumped together.
To change that, we want to launch the GravityBox module for Xposed Framework and dive into the Statusbar Tweaks option. From here, you should see a menu labeled Notification Drawer Style and it’s here that you’ll find a number of different mods for the notification panel. We’ll be ignoring most of them as there aren’t many important ones here. Instead, look toward the bottom and you’ll see an option called Expand All Notifications.
There will be a checkbox to the right of if that by default is empty. Tapping on this option or the checkbox will enable the feature and it will instantly change the way notifications are controlled. You can see a demonstration of this in the embedded video above where I show two of three notifications from PushBullet are collapsed by default. However, once I enable this feature then it will automatically expand the three notifications.
Not only will this keep the actionable buttons visible for each notification at all times, but you will also be able to read more of the notification itself since it’s not being shortened to save space.
