Android: No icon for Notification

Question

I wanted to create a notification without the icon in the status bar (the state that is not expanded). I tried the custom expanded view and set the icon for this view only.

Answer 1

QuickSettings did this and as I looked at that code I saw it uses the default constructor of Notification and pushes its icon to the right of the notification bar. I think it still uses space but has no icon.

Some code:

notification = new Notification();
notification.flags |= Notification.FLAG_ONGOING_EVENT;
notification.flags |= Notification.FLAG_NO_CLEAR;
long hiddenTime = Constants.SDK_VERSION >= 9 ? -Long.MAX_VALUE : Long.MAX_VALUE;
notification.when = visible ? System.currentTimeMillis() : hiddenTime; // align
// left (0) / right (max) in status bar

edit: oh sorry I missed an important line of code, in fact he uses a placeholder. But now you have some code ;-)

notification.icon = visible ? (status == Constants.STATUS_BLACK_ICON ? 
                            R.drawable.ic_logo_black : R.drawable.ic_logo_white)
                            : R.drawable.ic_placeholder;

http://code.google.com/p/quick-settings/source/browse/trunk/quick-settings/src/com/bwx/bequick/receivers/StatusBarIntegrationReceiver.java

Answer 2

Here's something to experiment with. Put up a notification twice, once with icon=0 and once with a real icon. Try it in one order and then in the opposite order.

I got the effect of no notification in status bar and notification in expanded list when I did something like this, except that one of the two (the one with icon=0) was put up by Service.startForeground(). I don't have time to experiment more right now.

Answer 3

You could use a transparent images as the notification icon. but as molnarm already mentioned, the user won't notify that there is a new notification

Answer 4

This is now possible in Android 4.1; the reference implementation of the Jelly Bean status bar will suppress icons for PRIORITY_MIN notifications, although their content will still show in the notification panel.