Google Chrome is making it easier to unsubscribe from website notifications on Android

Ben Schoon | Jan 30 2024 - 8:20 am PT

Notifications from websites are a good idea in theory, but they’re abused incredibly often by sites that try to trick you into flipping on notifications just because they’re not easy to turn off. Google Chrome for Android, though, is working on a way to make it faster and easier to unsubscribe from website notifications.

As highlighted by Windows Report, Google Chrome is working on a new “one tap notification unsubscribe” option for its Android version. This would allow users to unsubscribe from a website’s notification directly from the push notification in Android.

The short version is that Chrome notifications would show an “unsubscribe” button directly in Android’s notification tray.

Google describes:

To improve user control over web push notifications displayed on behalf of websites, we rework the UX flow that stars with the user tapping the [Site Settings] button, which Chrome already places on each web push notification on mobile. Today, however, this flow then requires two additional taps and two context switches to complete.

We streamline this flow by replacing the [Site settings] button with an [Unsubscribe] button that revokes the permission from the given website (i.e. origin) in one tap, and instead offers an [Undo] action on the subsequently displayed confirmation notification, just in case the unsubscribe was accidental.

The functionality can be enabled now in the latest Chrome Canary releases under chrome://flags#notification-one-tap-unsubscribe. It’s not entirely clear when this would be available in stable builds.

Notably, Google also offers an “undo” option that shows temporarily in the notification shade if you hit this button on accident, much like Gmail notifications do when you tap “archive.”