Android 15

Android 15 may deliver more notification improvements including sync, rejecting old notifications

Ben Schoon | Sep 23 2024 - 9:45 am PT

Old notifications might turn into a thing of the past as Android 15 will reportedly be introducing a tweak that blocks notifications older than two weeks.

If you’ve ever left an Android phone or tablet alone for a while, you might have turned it on to a flood of notifications come through when turning it back on. It’s annoying, though certainly not a frequent issue. But, apparently, Google is fixing it.

Spotted by Android Authority, Android 15 QPR1 automatically “rejects” notifications that are older than two weeks by default. This leads to that notification not triggering a ringtone or vibration, or even showing a full-size notification. Rather, the alert is delivered silently and in a minimized state.

Realistically, this won’t affect a ton of people, but it’s a nice bit of progress that comes from a platform that’s maturing.

In a similar effort, Android 15 appears to be bringing back a “cooldown” for notifications – something we reported on in the first Developer Preview release – for a future release, though it’s not confirmed this could arrive in Android 15 itself.

Beyond that, work on “syncing” notifications across devices was spotted. Google technically introduced notification sync to Android in 2013, showcasing the functionality on stage at Google I/O, but at the time that was an app-based system that developers needed to sign on for. This new effort, it seems, would work alongside Google’s new cross-device services (the first features of which are rolling out now) to work on a platform level instead of per-app, but there are still a lot of specifics that are unclear here.