Wow, amazing. They updated the docs too -- just a few days ago, it said something like:
"The system will make a determination about how to interpret notification priority as described in MUMBLE MUMBLE".
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=37700Won't make it into the next update (which I'm about to post, with a couple of important fixes), but I'll look into it very soon.
Thanks again!
<mumble>
But wait, that completely thwarts the intention, preventing silently running malware... This was the purpose of requiring the icon since 2.0.
Is Google going to consider this a bug and "fix" it, or did they give up on trying to control all the stuff that runs all the time on a typical Android device?
Let's hope nobody from the Android team is reading this.
</mumble>