Question: I'm creating a bigContentView notification layout [as seen in this blog post](https://wiki.pushapps.mobi/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=5407074).
For tracking purposes it is important for me to know whether the bigContentView layout was displayed or not? Is there a programmatic way to know that? It could be before I display the notification or after.

Answer: 
You can surely estabilish if the **bigContentView** is (at least) set in your notification because is API-level dependent (API 16): this means you can **easly check if a session is eligible to display a big notification** or not and trace your metric accordingly by simply verifying the system api level.

Regarding the current notification displaying state, the only one who knows how is really showing is the system; actually there's no way to know if it is expanded or not.
The closest I can think of at the moment to the notify event is at the GCM BroadcastReceiver's `onReceive()` [method](https://developer.android.com/google/gcm/client.html#sample-receive).

With regards to strictly bigContentView displays, this may prove to be a challenge. The [documentation](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Notification.html#bigContentView) states that the "system UI may choose to show [bigContentView] instead of the normal content view *at its discretion*."