Android Customizations
Customizing Android mobile app notifications with your app icons, colors, and style.
Android Mobile App Notifications Only
This section is for Android Mobile app customizations only. If you have a website, please see our Web Push Customizations guide.
Custom Notification Icons
Read more on the Android Notification Icons page.
Notification Categories
Notification categories are a new Android Oreo (8.0) feature which gives users finer control over notifications. You can select a category from Android Options or API android_channel_id
when Sending Push Messages. To learn more about how Android Categories see Android Notification Categories.

Action Buttons
Android 4.1 and newer devices support actions buttons. You can specify up to 3 buttons that will display below your notification content. See Action Buttons.

Big Picture
See Images & Rich Media.
LED Color
Certain Android hardware devices have LED notification lights built-in, allowing notifications to trigger a colored notification light on a device upon receipt. Notification colors may be set on a per-message basis in the OneSignal dashboard, or via the OneSignal SDK/API.
Notification colors are set using ARGB Hex values (e.g. a red LED notification light would be in the format FF99000
). If LED Color is not set, the light uses the device's default color.
Accent Color
Accent colors only apply to apps targeting Android API level 21+ running on Android 5.0+ devices.
Accent colors are the background color around your small icon, which appears to the left of the notification content in a notification. Like LED Colors, accent colors may be set with an ARGB Hex value in either the dashboard or SDK/API. If Accent Color is not set, the color is set to grey. Read more in Android Notification Icons
Notification Grouping
Android supports grouping or combining notifications together.
See Notification Grouping for more details.
App Icon Badge Count Permissions
The OneSignal SDK automatically sets the badge count on your app to the number of notifications that are currently in the notification shade.
See our Android Badges Guide for more details on the behavior and on how you can disable this.
Notification Sounds
Read more in Customize Notification Sounds
Disable OneSignal's Notification Open Behavior
When a notification is tapped on OneSignal will resume your app, or open your launcher Activity if your app was swiped away. If you have set a launch URL OneSignal will also open it. See URLs, Links and Deep Links if you want to only customize this behavior.
If you want to fully disable all automatic open behaviors of your OneSignal notifications add the following to your AndroidManifest.xml
:
<application ...>
<meta-data android:name="com.onesignal.NotificationOpened.DEFAULT" android:value="DISABLE" />
</application>
Make sure you are initializing OneSignal with setNotificationOpenedHandler in the onCreate
method in your Application
class. You will need to call startActivity
from this callback to take the user to your intended Activity
.
Background Data and Notification Overriding
OneSignal supports sending additional data along with a notification as key value pairs. You can read this additional data when a notification is opened by adding a setNotificationOpenedHandler instead.
However, if you want to one of the following...
- Receive data in the background with or without displaying a notification.
- Override specific notification settings depending on client-side app logic such as custom accent color, vibration pattern, or other any other
NotificationCompat
options available. See Android's documentation on the NotificationCompat options.
...continue with the instructions in our Service Extensions Setup.
See Huawei's documentation for more on Data and Message types.
Right-to-Left (RTL) Notification Support
To support notifications with right-to-left languages correctly you must add android:supportsRtl="true"
to your <application>
tag in your AndroidManifest.xml
.
<application
android:supportsRtl="true"
android:icon="@drawable/ic_launcher"
android:theme="@style/AppTheme"
android:label="OneSignal Example"
android:name=".OneSignalExampleApp">
...
</application>
Note, make sure to test all your Activities as this effect all views in your app.
Updated 5 months ago
Learn about setting up more features, or start using the OneSignal Dashboard