Disclaimer I had to do some archeology, and can only give a guess answer based on #cef09fe (Change-Id: I9d0a572c84da0e83aac54b896fd669ce58f58739).
Grouped Notifications were added in Android 4.4 Kitkat Watch (API level 20).
Grouped notifications may display in a cluster or stack on devices which support such rendering.
And my guess is that side channel is a way for AppCompat to support this when the framework NotificationManager
doesn't.
So basically, you shouldn't care about this if you are targeting devices on KitKat Watch (API 20) or later.