Google may be experimenting with turning off one of Android's lesser-used features. Most folks don't know it, but you can half-drag a notification to bring up additional options for it. Once upon a time, you could use that to snooze notifications (and that has a new spot in Android 12), but now it's just a way to trigger the per-notification settings, just like a long-press. Well, given its functionality was both limited, non-intuitive, and a duplicate, it's probably no surprise that Google's experimenting with outright disabling it.

The change is hidden for now. XDA Developers' Mishaal Rahman has confirmed to us that he spotted the adjustment hidden inside this first Developer Preview release and manually enabled it for the demonstration embedded above, which disables the half-swipe entirely— no cog-shaped settings icon that takes you to the notification's settings. But again, by default, DP1 still has the same half-swipe functionality that Android 11 did.

It remains to be seen whether the feature will ultimately be cut or not, but Google is experimenting with the change internally, at least. And since the same settings for notifications can also be accessed via a long-press, not much would really be lost.

Source: @MishaalRahman