Android O - Notification Channels and NotificationCompat

Question

I cannot change this feeling: again, the Android developers came up with something new and leave everybody in the dark about how they would think the feature is used.

I

Answer 1

Here is an alternative solution that uses reflection to create the Notification Channel so you can set a compileSdkVersion of lower than 26.

   private void createNotificationChannel(NotificationManager notificationManager) {
        // Channel details
        String channelId = "myChannelId";
        String channelName = "Notifications";

        // Channel importance (3 means default importance)
        int channelImportance = 3;

        try {
            // Get NotificationChannel class via reflection (only available on devices running Android O or newer)
            Class notificationChannelClass = Class.forName("android.app.NotificationChannel");

            // Get NotificationChannel constructor
            Constructor notificationChannelConstructor = notificationChannelClass.getDeclaredConstructor(String.class, CharSequence.class, int.class);

            // Instantiate new notification channel
            Object notificationChannel = notificationChannelConstructor.newInstance(channelId, channelName, channelImportance);

            // Get notification channel creation method via reflection
            Method createNotificationChannelMethod =  notificationManager.getClass().getDeclaredMethod("createNotificationChannel", notificationChannelClass);

            // Invoke method on NotificationManager, passing in the channel object
            createNotificationChannelMethod.invoke(notificationManager, notificationChannel);

            // Log success to console
            Log.d("MyApp", "Notification channel created successfully");
        }
        catch (Exception exc) {
            // Log exception to console
            Log.e("MyApp", "Creating notification channel failed", exc);
        }
    }

Then, when you're building your notifications, simply call the .setChannelId() method of NotificationCompat.Builder:

builder.setChannelId("myChannelId");

Note: You need to update your appcompat-v7 library to version 26.x.x in build.gradle:

compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:26.1.0'