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 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 dismiss persistent ones if we really needed to (long tap etc)
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.
My use case isn’t that important, I can find some other workflow. But there are other more important apps like blood sugar monitors and home security/alert apps that use persistent notifs for functionality.
To each his own, but your use case seems like the worst way to accomplish what you need. There are so, so many apps that will allow you to pin a widget to one of your homescreens with a to-do; why on earth would you want to have that living in your notification shade? I have a Keep to-do widget and the Android battery widget on a second homescreen to the right of the main. Exactly as much work as pulling down the shade, except I swipe left instead of down, and no chance of accidentally clearing the persistent notification.
It’s not quite the same - the notification shade can be pulled down from anywhere, no matter what app you’re in, whereas what you describe only really works if you’re on the home screen.
I have a calendar widget that I use, but this was more for the very important “leave a sticky on the doorknob” type tasks.
I tried a widget for a while, but I found that I either didn’t swipe to that page or I didn’t like having that space blocked off by an empty widget for the periods of time when I didn’t have a task.
It worked for what I needed, but I guess I’ll explore options again
The problem is you are trying to use a system for something it was never intended for. Persistent notifications were only ever intended for long running background services.
Even for those though it’s broken now. For example, I use fkm as an indicator that my phone is dozing/charging correctly and rotation control to force apps into the orientation I want them. Both effectively require persistent notifications to work as intended.
This behavior decision by Google is a straight downgrade. It needed to be at worst togglable by the user.