After four years, Google gets its notification bell back, but the beloved Mr. Jingles is still on hiatus

Google+ shut down in back in 2019, and at that time, Google also removed the extremely useful notification bell from Search on the web and mobile. This bell would show you notifications for things like Gmail, Google Photos and Hangouts Chats as well as Assistant alerts.

Now, that bell has re-appeared on mobile via the Google Search app for Android (so far as I’ve seen), and it’s displaying just and only weather and Google Discover notifications. These notifs are for articles that appeared in your feed that you may have missed. Tapping on one of them will re-load your feed and display the article at the top of the feed for consumption.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be for much else right now except perhaps websites you’ve followed in your Chrome Follow Feed or topics you’ve followed in Discover itself. It’s hard to tell at this time, but one thing is clear – the famous and beloved Mr. Jingles from Google+ is missing!

The bell notification on Google’s lost but not forgotten “social spine” is not present in this new notification bell’s return to glory, and I have a bone to pick with Google for this! There was nothing better than getting rid of all of your notifications only to see Mr. Jingles shake cheerfully and add a bit of happiness back into your day. Come on, Google, don’t be boring, bring him back!

With that being said, I hope that this now re-added notification bell will soon feature things for other Google web services like incoming emails, chats, and more as it used to. In fact, I would absolutely love if somehow Google found a way to merge this with its Chromebook notification tray for your account!

Think about it – unified notifications across your Chromebook and Chrome browser so you could still get pings about important web apps you use daily while on a Windows machine or something else entirely like your phone? I see that as a win. I do, however, see this being redundant on Chromebooks and think that would get quite annoying.

Perhaps Google could instead mute web notifications while you’re on a Chromebook much in the same way that it disables Gmail and Chat notifications for one device while you’re on the other. The Better Together initiative should stretch further than hardware and perhaps into web usage too.

Let me know if you see this appearing for you on the Google app for your phone. So far, there’s no sign of this feature appearing on desktop so far as I’m aware, and certainly no sign of our adorable bell mascot either. Oh well.