title: Android O - Notification Channels and NotificationCompat
body: <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>I am talking about Notification Channels in Android O.</p>
  
  <p>For years I have been using the compatibility support libraries to avoid dealing with specific platform details. Namely: <code>NotificationCompat</code>.</p>
  
  <p>Now, the <code>Builder</code> requires me to supply a notification channel id, which is nice, but completely leaves me alone with creating such a channel. I cannot find any compat support for creating channels. Nor can I find a reasonable way to create them at the right point.</p>
  
  <p>The docs simply state that it should be done "somewhere" and "probably not when issuing a notification". But what exactly am I supposed to do? I hate writing version specific stuff for simple tasks - that's why I use the compat libraries.</p>
  
  <p>Does anybody have a suggestion on how to handle it? Is it "expensive" to do the creating each and every time when I want a notification to be displayed?</p>