Android 15 Will Silence Old and Irrelevant Notifications

Android 15 will soon start silencing alerts older than two weeks to help prevent notification hell, especially when booting a device you haven’t used in a while.

I don’t like it when old notifications pile up, increasing my anxiety levels and making it more difficult than necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. That’s about to change in an upcoming update to Android 15. The second beta of Android 15 QPR1 no longer plays a chime or vibrates your device if a notification was posted more than two weeks ago. Android determines notification age by comparing the time a server issued the notifications to the current time, as evidenced by its timestamp in the notifications panel.

Furthermore, the contents of old notifications are hidden. All you get to see is the alert icon, which gives you a sense of which app or contact messaged you. This small but useful tweak is going to be especially convenient when turning on an Android device that has been lying dormant for some time. No longer will you get inundated with irrelevant, outdated notifications! Only alerts that are less than two weeks old will be displayed along with their contents.

You can, of course, mute the device to silence these alerts, but Google’s new feature seems like a far more elegant solution to the notification spam problem. As always, we’ll have to try it out ourselves when the update launches to the public to see how well it works.

Another upcoming feature will sync notification dismissals so that an irrelevant alert you’ve already dismissed on one device won’t return to haunt you on all your others.

Plus, Google is testing a notification cooldown feature where the operating system would prevent successive notifications sent in a short period from pinging and vibrating your device. The cooldown period is relatively short, and the notification volume returns to regular levels after a few minutes of silence, so you don’t miss anything.

The Android 15 update is expected to roll out in October 2024, though it may not be available for your device until early 2025. Next year, the Android 16 update may build on these notification improvements by separating notifications and Quick Settings into two different panels.

Source: Android Authority