Android 16 QPR2 Update: AI Notification Summaries, Material 3 Expressive, and All the New Features (December 2025)

As of December 4, 2025, Android 16 has just received its biggest post-launch upgrade yet. Google is rolling out Android 16 QPR2 (Quarterly Platform Release 2) to Pixel phones with a wave of new AI-powered notification tools, deeper customization, security upgrades, and a hefty December 2025 bug-fix patch. ^[1]

At the same time, Google is pushing a broader strategy shift: instead of one massive OS update each year, Android will now get more frequent platform and SDK releases, meaning features like these land on phones faster and more consistently. ^[2]

Here’s a detailed look at what’s new in Android 16 right now, based on today’s coverage and Google’s own announcements.

Android 16 in 2025: From Early Launch to Today’s Update Wave

Android 16 — codenamed Baklava — is Google’s latest major OS version, officially released on June 10, 2025, after a preview and beta program that ran from late 2024 into early 2025. ^[3]

Key high-level points about Android 16 so far:

It’s based on Linux kernel 6.12 (with some devices on slightly older kernels). ^[4]
As of late 2025, around 9.8% of active Android devices are already running Android 16, making it one of the faster-adopted recent releases. ^[5]
The OS introduces big pillars like Live Updates (progress-centric notifications), a new desktop mode for large screens, an expanded Linux terminal/virtual machine environment, and early stages of the Material 3 Expressive design overhaul. ^[6]

Earlier this year, Android 16 QPR1 brought the first big wave of Material 3 Expressive visuals to Pixel phones and tablets — smoother animations, new lockscreen effects, and revamped Quick Settings — starting with the Pixel 10 and rolling back to Pixel 6 and newer. ^[7]

Now QPR2 is here, and it’s the first “minor SDK” release in Android history — meaning it adds APIs and features without major behavior-breaking changes, so developers can ship new capabilities more quickly. ^[8]

Android 16 QPR2: The December 2025 Feature Drop

A New Minor SDK Era

Google’s own Android Developers Blog describes Android 16 QPR2 as the first minor SDK release, designed to deliver new APIs and platform capabilities between major OS versions. ^[9]

QPR2 is additive, focusing on features and security/accessibility tweaks rather than disruptive behavioral changes. ^[10]
New SDK fields like SDK_INT_FULL and VERSION_CODES_FULL let apps detect QPR2-specific APIs (internally labelled as a “Baklava_1” level). ^[11]

From a user perspective, that translates into more visible upgrades like AI notifications and customization, while under the hood developers get new APIs for media, connectivity, health, and security without waiting for Android 17. ^[12]

Smarter Notifications: AI Summaries and a Notification Organizer

The headline feature of December’s Android 16 updates is smarter, AI-driven notification management.

Google’s official blog and multiple outlets highlight two core additions: ^[13]

AI-powered notification summaries
- Long group chats and message threads can be compressed into short summaries directly in the notification shade.
- The feature focuses on messaging apps, unlike some competitors that apply AI summaries more broadly to news or other content. ^[14]
- Early hands-on reports describe it as surprisingly useful for filtering out noise — one reviewer notes how Gemini turned a 40-message group chat into a single sentence that made it obvious whether anything important happened. ^[15]
Notification organizer
- A new notification organizer automatically groups and deprioritizes low-importance alerts — things like promotions, news push alerts, and social pings — into categories that sit at the bottom of the shade. ^[16]
- When minimized, these show as a stack of app icons, dramatically reducing clutter while preserving access. ^[17]

On top of these, Android 16 broadly pushes a notification hygiene agenda:

Forced notification bundling by app is now standard, replacing the old optional grouping that developers could ignore. ^[18]
Notification cooldown lowers alert volume when a single app is spamming you, a feature that first appeared on Pixels and is now platform-wide in Android 16. ^[19]
Live Updates, introduced with Android 16, make ongoing tasks like deliveries or ride-hailing more prominent and consistent on the lock screen and Always-On Display, and these will continue to evolve via QPR releases. ^[20]

Overall, Android 16 is finally treating notifications as a smart feed instead of a chaotic list — a theme echoed in coverage from Android Central and other outlets. ^[21]

Material 3 Expressive and New Customization Tools

With QPR2, Android 16 continues to roll out Material 3 Expressive, Google’s vibrant new design language, alongside new customization options. ^[22]

Key visual and customization changes include:

Custom icon shapes:
You can now choose alternative shapes for app icons (circle, rounded square, and more) from Wallpaper & style > Icons, applied across the home screen and folders. ^[23]
Auto-generated themed icons:
For apps that don’t ship their own themed icon, Android can now generate one automatically by applying color filters that match your system theme, helping clean up mismatched icon grids. ^[24]
Expanded dark theme:
A new Expanded option in dark theme automatically inverts most light-only apps, making them effectively dark even if the developer never added a dark mode. This is aimed at accessibility (low vision, photosensitivity) and consistency, though Google still recommends apps ship native dark themes. ^[25]
More Material 3 Expressive inside Settings & system UI:
QPR2 adds richer card layouts and iconography in sections like Notification history and Security & privacy, plus bolder Dynamic Color in the Pixel Launcher search bar and more expressive lockscreen widgets. ^[26]

There are also smaller polish touches:

Long-pressing an app now exposes distinct “Remove” and “+” actions for quickly adding shortcuts to the home screen. ^[27]
The Pixel lockscreen can show a widget feed when you swipe left, configurable through Settings with an updated widget picker. ^[28]

Parental Controls and Digital Wellbeing

Family tools get a notable upgrade in Android 16’s latest release:

A new “Parental Controls” section now lives directly in Settings, split out from Digital Wellbeing to give it clearer prominence. ^[29]
From there, parents can:
- Set daily screen time limits
- Configure downtime schedules (e.g., overnight lockouts)
- Restrict or block specific apps
- Grant extra time in small increments when needed
- Link into Google Family Link for more advanced controls like School Time and purchase approvals. ^[30]

These controls are PIN-protected and designed to work directly on the child or teen’s device, rather than only through a separate parent app. ^[31]

Accessibility, Captions, and AI Safety Features

December’s Android push isn’t just about flashy UI — it’s also a major accessibility and safety update.

From Google’s own “New Android features” blog and coverage across tech media, the key additions are: ^[32]

Expressive Captions with emotion tags
- Real-time captions can now show emotion cues like [joyful] or [sad] and ambient sounds such as [cheers and applause], initially for English YouTube videos uploaded after October and other live video contexts. ^[33]
Live Caption shortcut improvements
- On Pixels, Live Caption is now pinned to the bottom of the volume slider, so you don’t have to open the full volume panel to toggle it. ^[34]
Call Reason (beta)
- You can mark an outgoing call as “urgent”, and the recipient will see that label both on the incoming screen and later in call history — handy for time-sensitive calls. ^[35]
Safer group chats & anti-spam
- When an unknown number adds you to a group in Google Messages, Android now shows an alert with group info and safety tips, plus one-tap actions to leave, block, and report. ^[36]
Circle to Search scam detection
- With Circle to Search, you can highlight suspicious text on-screen (like a bank “warning” or delivery scam), and Android will show an AI Overview that tells you if the message is likely a scam and suggests what to do next. ^[37]
Hearing and input improvements
- Fast Pair is expanding to Bluetooth LE hearing aids (starting with Demant, with Starkey support expected in early 2026).
- Voice Access is easier to launch by voice (“Hey Google, start Voice Access”) and better at understanding accents and punctuation.
- Refined AutoClick options help users with motor challenges customize how long the cursor pauses before a click or drag is triggered. ^[38]

Collectively, these changes position Android 16 as a more inclusive platform, especially when paired with the new dark theme accessibility features.

Security, Health, and Under-the-Hood Upgrades

Android 16 QPR2 is also packed with foundational improvements that users might not see, but will feel over time. From the developer blog: ^[39]

Generational garbage collection in ART focuses cleaning on newer objects, reducing CPU usage and potentially improving battery life.
A Linux development environment now supports GUI apps inside the Android virtualization framework, turning higher-end devices into more capable dev machines.
New widget engagement metrics APIs let developers analyze how people interact with home screen widgets (scrolls, clicks, impressions).
IAMF spatial audio decoding and LE Audio personal audio sharing are now integrated into the system, boosting media capabilities.
Health Connect can automatically log steps, weight and more, pulling directly from device sensors and exposing that data (with permission) to health and fitness apps. ^[40]

On the security and privacy side:

SMS OTP protection delays SMS messages with OTP retrieval hashes for most apps by about three hours, foiling many OTP hijacking attacks while still delivering the code eventually. ^[41]
A new Secure Lock Device state lets you remotely lock a phone (e.g., via Find My Device) so it can only be unlocked with the primary PIN/pattern/password; biometrics and lockscreen notifications are disabled in this state. ^[42]
Developer verification APIs help verify app publishers during installs, with new ADB tools to test different verification outcomes. ^[43]

Pixel December 2025 Patch: Over 130 Fixes

Alongside QPR2, Google is pushing the December 2025 security update for Pixel devices. Android Headlines notes that the patch bundle includes: ^[44]

51 Android security fixes dated December 1
56 more for the December 5 patch level
28 additional Pixel-specific security fixes

In total, that’s 130+ security entries, plus a “flood” of bug fixes spanning:

Audio stability and crashes on Pixel 9 and Pixel 10
Display flashing and corruption issues on Pixel 10
Fingerprint unlock reliability improvements for newer Pixels
Wi‑Fi stability improvements for Pixel 8 series
Fixes around battery limits, charging behavior, sensors, UI freezes, and more

Supported devices include the Pixel 6 series up through the latest Pixel 10 lineup, plus Pixel Fold models and the Pixel Tablet, which matches the rollout list given in QPR2 coverage. ^[45]

Android 16 Across the Ecosystem: Samsung, Realme, and More

Android 16 is no longer just a Pixel story. OEMs are actively rolling out Android 16-based skins and devices:

Samsung One UI 8 & 8.5 (Android 16-based)
- Samsung’s One UI 8 rollout — built on Android 16 — has resumed for the Galaxy S23 and S24 series after an earlier pause, bringing Samsung’s own visual tweaks on top of Android 16’s core features. ^[46]
- The newly announced Galaxy Z TriFold tri-foldable, with a tablet-like unfolded display around 10 inches, ships with an Android 16-based One UI build, showcasing Android 16’s large-screen and multi-window capabilities. ^[47]
- Samsung-focused coverage also notes that many Android 16 QPR2 features — like the expanded dark theme and notification tweaks — are likely to be absorbed into One UI 8.5 next year. ^[48]
Realme UI 7.0 (Android 16)
- Realme has officially announced Realme UI 7.0, its custom skin built on Android 16, with a multi-phase rollout through late 2025 and early 2026. ^[49]
- The update focuses on a “Light Glass” visual style, crystal-like Ice Cube icons, and translucent control center elements, plus performance and AI improvements — all layered on Android 16’s notification, privacy, and health features. ^[50]

As Google pushes Android 16’s notification and customization story, these OEM skins are starting to inherit many of the same ideas, especially around AI summaries, notification bundling, and system-wide dark modes. ^[51]

Android 16 vs. Apple Intelligence: A Growing AI Rivalry

Several recent opinion pieces compare Android 16’s Gemini-powered features with Apple’s Apple Intelligence suite. One widely shared commentary describes Android’s advantage as “curiosity meets utility” — emphasizing everyday usefulness like summarizing noisy group chats and highlighting scams in real time. ^[52]

Where Apple leans into polished content creation and on-device generative features, Android 16’s current AI focus is on:

Time-saving notification summaries
Safety tools such as Circle to Search scam checks and smarter group chat controls
Accessibility-centric AI like Expressive Captions and more capable guided camera experiences on Pixel devices. ^[53]

It’s clear that Android 16 is positioning AI as a quiet assistant woven into everyday flows, rather than a separate destination app.

How to Get Android 16 QPR2 Today

If you’re on a Pixel, getting the new Android 16 features is straightforward: ^[54]

Open Settings
Go to System > System update
Tap “Check for update”
Download and install the Android 16 QPR2 update (around 700–800MB on many devices)

Notes:

Pixel 6 and newer phones, Pixel Fold models, and the Pixel Tablet are all eligible. ^[55]
If you were on the Android 16 QPR2 Beta (3.3 or later), you’ll receive a small patch to the final release; Google notes you may need to opt out of the Beta Program to remain on stable going forward. ^[56]
OEM devices like Samsung and Realme models will receive Android 16 and QPR-feature equivalents via their own One UI 8/8.5 or Realme UI 7.0 updates according to each vendor’s schedule. ^[57]

What’s Next for Android 16?

With Android 16 now on a major + minor SDK cadence, we can expect: ^[58]

Further QPR releases (like QPR3) that expand Material 3 Expressive across more system UI, apps, and possibly desktops/large-screen features.
A fuller rollout of desktop mode, building on the early previews that mimic ChromeOS- or DeX-style windowed multitasking.
Continued expansion of AI-powered experiences (beyond notifications) as Gemini gets deeper hooks into apps via the App Functions / Gemini Extensions APIs.

For now, on December 4, 2025, Android 16 QPR2 marks a clear turning point: Android updates are faster, more frequent, and more AI-centric than before — and that’s good news whether you’re on a Pixel today or waiting for OEM updates tomorrow.