It took Google years to add this Android 15 feature, and it's still half-baked

If there’s one feature I’ve had on the top of my Android wishlist for nearly a decade now, it’s notification sync across devices. I realize my use case is extreme since I have several Android phones on my desk right now and many more in my gadget drawer, but there was a time when I just had one phone and one tablet and I still got tired of seeing duplicate notifications across both of them.

But notification dismissal across phones is here now, finally, as part of Android 15! Well, uh, scratch that. It’s here if you have a Pixel 6 or newer, because it’s only rolling out as a Pixel-exclusive option. That’s one of the first limitations of the option for me. The other is more… complicated.

Pixels get the best treatment

Yes, turning off duplicate notifications is available across my Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro Fold, Pixel 7 Pro, and Pixel Tablet, but everything else is left out. My Galaxy S24 Ultra, Nothing Phone 2, and a few other test devices don’t play along. So the avalanche of notifications is there every time I pick them up or turn them on, and I have to wait for a minute or two while they catch up before I do anything else. It doesn’t matter if I’ve dismissed these already on my Pixel devices; they’ll still be there for me on my other phones.

And look, once again, I know I’m a fringe case, but if I only had a Pixel phone and a Galaxy Tab or a OnePlus phone and a Pixel Tablet, I’d still be in that messy situation where one device wants to sync its notification state while the other can’t, and the whole feature would be useless to me. You really need to be all-in on nothing but Pixels to get the benefit.

One would hope that Google is now boosting its own Pixel brand by keeping the feature exclusive, but it should roll it out to more Android phones later. Well, at least that’s what happened already with a couple of other Pixel exclusives and I think it’ll be the case here.

What’s up with the account picker?

Even if the setting made its way across the entire Android ecosystem soon, there’s another limitation that’s irking me just as much. The option to sync notification dismissal is limited to one Google account, and I can’t find Google’s documentation to understand what that exactly means.

I have three Google accounts — a personal one, a work one, and a joint account with my husband. They all serve different purposes and have separate email communication, calendars, bookmarks, map places, and so on. I even make sure to download apps from the right Play Store account when installing new Android apps (Asana and Slack from my work account, Instagram from my personal one, Amazon and Uber from the joint account — you get the gist).

So, what exactly am I getting or not getting by selecting one account or the other? Common sense says it shouldn’t matter which account I choose: As long as it’s the same one and it’s linked to all of my Pixel phones, it should work across all of the phones, apps, and notifications. Right?

Well, so far, I’ve seen duplicate notifications still pop up on my Pixel Tablet after I’ve dismissed them on my phone, even from Google’s own apps, which are signed in with the same account. So either the feature is not fully rolled out (we’ve seen this before with cross-device sync, where the setting showed up weeks before the feature really started working) or there’s some account-based limitation at play that I’m not aware of.

I’m afraid, though, that this account picker means something else. Maybe it only syncs notification dismissal for the emails, calendar events, missed Meet calls, Photos memories, etc. of that same Google account. So, if I select my personal email, I’ll still get duplicates of my work and couple’s email notifications. Huh. Even worse, maybe it only works for apps where I’m signed in with my personal Google account or apps tied to my personal Google Play Store. Maybe it doesn’t work with third-party apps even — I don’t know!

It’s clear that Google needs to explain this feature better, what we should expect of it, and why we have to pick a Google account. Is it just a way to link the entire notifications of the two phones together or is it picking and choosing what notifications to sync and which ones to keep dupes of? And if it’s supposed to be functional, then something is off and not working. Or, if it’s not live nor functional, then it’s time the devs refrained from surfacing settings for features that don’t work just yet lest they get confused people like me wondering why something isn’t doing what it’s supposed to.

And maybe all of these hiccups are why we haven’t seen the feature come to all of Android just yet. So yes, once all of the issues are ironed out, I’d love to see this roll out widely across the ecosystem. Until then, here goes another sad sigh for a promise not fully delivered.