Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- The stable Android 15 update adds a new feature that dismisses notifications across Pixel devices.
- Specifically, this feature syncs notification dismissals, so when you dismiss a notification on your Pixel phone, it won’t appear on your Pixel tablet, and vice versa.
- There were hopes that Google would make this feature available for all Android devices, but it seems to be Pixel-exclusive for now.
If you have an Android tablet that you use on occasion, then you’re probably familiar with the issue of duplicate notifications. Notifications that you’ve already seen and dismissed on your Android phone will still appear on your Android tablet until you dismiss them there, too. This is admittedly a minor annoyance, but it makes Android feel like a disjointed ecosystem. Fortunately, Google has a solution to duplicate notifications in the Android 15 update it’s releasing today, but you’ll need to have Pixel devices to take advantage of it.
In the stable Android 15 update that Google released today for Pixel devices, the company is introducing a new “dismiss notifications across Pixel devices” option under Settings > Notifications. This feature is available on the Pixel 6 and later, including the Pixel Tablet, and its description says that “notifications dismissed on your Pixel phone or tablet will no longer appear on both.” Tapping the option opens up a page where you can enable the feature for one of your Google accounts (but not all of them).
In order to enable the feature, you first must grant the Device Connectivity Services app permission to access your notifications. Device Connectivity Services is a Pixel-exclusive system app that appears to be the one handling this notification syncing feature. It’s using Android’s Notification Listener API to read and dismiss notifications on your behalf. Access to this API is managed under Settings > Apps > Special app access > Notification read, reply & control.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
Google says this feature only dismisses notifications when each Pixel device that has the feature enabled is connected to Wi-Fi. Even though this feature probably wouldn’t eat up much battery life, it still makes sense only to run it when the device is on Wi-Fi, since most people leave their tablets at home. If Google had a 5G version of its Pixel Tablet, then I would argue that Google should add an option to enable the feature when you’re on mobile data. However, it doesn’t, so there’s no point in adding such an option.
That being said, I’m a bit disappointed this notification sync feature is exclusive to Pixel devices. When I first spotted evidence of this feature in the second beta for Android 15 QPR1, I wasn’t sure whether it would be available for all Android devices or only Pixel devices. Google recently started rolling out a suite of cross-device services that make Android devices work better together regardless of which brand they come from, so it would’ve made perfect sense for this feature to be added to that suite. Still, if you own a Pixel Tablet and a Pixel phone, then I’m sure you’ll find this new feature in the Android 15 update to be very useful.
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