When Google removed the Play Store’s ability to notify users of app updates, people were understandably pissed off. This even led to a third-party solution being developed, before Google finally made sense and brought it back as an optional setting (albeit disabled by default). This functionality now seems to be broken on various Android phones.

As noted by our own Artem Russakovski, if you try to enable app update notifications for a Pixel phone, you just get stuck. If you go to the Play Store app> Settings> Notifications> Updates completed and hit the switch, the normal procedure will take you to the notification categories setting in Android, where you need to turn on another switch. On phones other than Pixels we tested this seems to work as expected but the notifications don’t seem to appear.

On Google phones, the whole thing is borked – nothing happens if you flip the switch and the setting isn’t activated. Look:

If you go back to the full list of notification categories for the Play Store and find the toggle in the list, it seems to work there. However, this is only superficial and the choice is not remembered. Go back to the Android settings or the app’s own settings and it will turn off again.

It’s hard to say why Google has so much trouble with what should be such a simple feature for its app store. We will monitor the situation and let you know when a fix is ​​rolled out, but don’t hold your breath for a quick fix.