"Notification ranker" - what does it do, and what happens if I disable it? After staying for so long on Marshmallow, today I finally made the decision to upgrade one of my secondary devices with Nougat (LineageOS 14.1 to be precise). Everything went smooth and most things stayed familiar... except this weird entry in Settings - Developer options - Running services.

  
Screenshots (click images for larger variants)

I'd keep the running process list as clean as possible (habit, don't question why), but when I clicked into this "Android Services Library" and tried to stop it, it says it runs a "Notification ranker service" (second screenshot).

Clicking "Settings" there takes me to an app preference screen (third screenshot; likely the same as in Settings - Apps) that contains nothing about the service or the app:

Furthermore, I can't find any reference on how this "notification ranker" mechanism works, or even what it is.

Note that I also flashed stock Nougat on my Nexus 6P before, and from what I remember, that one also has this service running, so it's not specific to LineageOS.

Can anyone with sufficient knowledge tell me what it does, and what will happen if I disable this service via external means, e.g. will notification functions be affected?
From arstechnica:


  GoogleExtServices has an app name of "Android Services Library" and
  does actually contain something: an "Android Notification Ranking
  Service." A "Notification Ranking Service" was added in Lollipop, and
  it sorts notifications by "importance" based on things like freshness,
  app type (IM apps come first), and by contact. This seems to be an
  extension to the system that includes support for Nougat's
  "notification bundling" feature. This is a really minor feature, and
  with only this single chunk of code, GoogleExtServices weighs in at a
  microscopic 10KB.