Key Takeaways
- Android 15 QPR1 Beta 2 includes a ‘reject old notifications’ feature that prevents notifications over 2 weeks old from pinging.
- With the tool, booting up a secondary device after weeks of inactivity should prevent old notifications from flooding your device.
- The tool might land with the first Pixel Feature Drop in December.
Google’s long-awaited Android 15 hasn’t seen a stable rollout just yet. We’re expecting the OS update to hit Pixel devices on October 15, followed by the first Feature Drop before the year concludes in December.
As part of the Android 15 QPR1 Beta, which will make the Feature Drop, we already know that Google is looking to tinker with the way consecutive app notifications perform. We’ve all got that one friend, who, instead of typing out one large message, prefers to send multiple small ones. The related QPR1 feature — Notification cooldown, as its name suggests, will tone down such consecutive notifications from specific apps by lowering their volume, ensuring they don’t annoy.
Now, offering similar anti-notification bombardment functionality, well-known Android expert Mishaal Rahman, in a report for Android Authority, suggests that the first Pixel Feature Drop will boast an ‘old notification rejection’ feature too.
If you have multiple Android devices but use only one as a daily driver, this feature is for you. For reference, if you have the same apps logged-in on more than one device, and you only use the secondary device occasionally, you’ll find that whenever you boot it up after a long period, it bombards you with a flood of notifications that you’ve already seen on your daily driver.
While not a make-or-break issue, the newly-found old notification rejection feature does make handling the overwhelming amount of notifications a lot easier, essentially by not highlighting them.
You’ll still be able to find these old notifications
Source: Andriod Authority
The upcoming feature rejects notifications that are older than two weeks old. While not much else is known about the feature, Rahman suggests that when enabled, it will no longer alert you with sound or vibrations when these old notifications come in. Additionally, their content won’t be displayed in the notification panel either, though information like who the notification is from, and which app it is connected to will still be shown. Your phone will determine the age of a notification by comparing its timestamp (the time its was sent, not when it was first received) to the current time.
Elsewhere, the tech giant also seems to be working on other ways to improve the notification experience on Android, including syncing notification dismissals across devices, and swapping Android’s notification icons out for regular app icons.