I didn’t really notice till now, and searching around I see lots of complaints in various communities for different apps.
Turns out it’s intended behavior in Android 14. The only persistent thing about it is that they don’t disappear when you hit “clear all”, which is something I never do because I only dismiss the ones I need to instead of nuking everything.
Feels like a big step backwards and I don’t understand the reasoning behind it. It was always possible to kill persistent notifications if we really needed to.
Is there any workaround to get it back?
Unnecessary backstory:
I use a notification creation app to leave important TODOs as pinned notifications so I see them when I check my phone.
I’ve missed some and I thought I was setting them wrong. Turns out the notifications can be dismissed accidentally, making the app useless.
There are things that could happen on the system which will dismiss notifications. If an app wants to keep notifying the user, it should have a notification management function that keeps track of its notifications and re-notifies when needed. Using a magic flag that may have prevented some types of dismissal is not super robust. E.g. if the app crashes or is force-stopped by the user or by the system, its notifications are dismissed. Upon restart, scheduled or user-initiated it should re-notify if it wants to keep the user aware of these notifications.
As for the reasoning, I’m suspecting there’s been abuse by apps and complaints by users.