Google on Monday updated the Google+ Android app with support for Notification Channels, one of the major features introduces as part of Android 8.0 Oreo. The functionality provides users with granular control over notifications on a per-app basis, allowing them to (de)prioritize certain types of notifications without resorting to app-wide settings. The initial version of Notification Channels support integrated into Google+ brings three main channels - New Activity, App Status Updates, and Content You Might Like. The three categories are relatively self-explanatory and tied to individual Google+ accounts, meaning that you'll be able to opt for different settings on your Brand account while simultaneously using another set of notification options for your personal one.
The New Activity category encompasses the most common type of notifications people get from social media - comments, mentions, tags, updates on pages and communities you follow, and similar activity prompts. The App Status Updates category pertains to system-specific actions like uploading photos to the service, whereas the final category serves you with recommendations and seemingly pulls suggestions from your Discover section of Google+. The Alphabet-owned company introduced Notification Channels support to Google+ in a way that ignores the app's existing notification categorization which differentiates between more than a dozen notification types, though it's possible that Google opts to expand this functionality in the future, ultimately allowing users to manage notification behavior for highly specific actions like event reminders, online polling votes, and collection shares. All of those options are still accessible from the app itself but can only be turned on or off and when they're enabled, they'll be subject to the settings attached to one of the three channels mentioned above.
The latest version of Google+ comes with the build number 9.20 and should already be available for download in all parts of the world; refer to the Google Play Store banner below to see whether your app already updated itself automatically or if you have to prompt the installation manually. The newly added support for Notification Channels relies on a native functionality of Android 8.0 Oreo and hence isn't available on devices running any older version of Google's mobile operating system.