Android 15 update blocks old notification noise — finally, some peace!

Android does many things right when it comes to handling notifications, such as combining them, showing you smart replies, letting you reply in-line, and more. However, many people still find some things about notifications on Android annoying. One example is how the OS handles, or rather doesn’t handle, old notifications. Fortunately, the latest beta for Android 15 finally has a fix for old notification spam.

Picture this: You have an old or secondary Android tablet that you only use on occasion, such as when you’re going on vacation. To maintain its battery, you keep it turned off when you aren’t using it, so it might go days or even weeks between uses. The next time you boot up that Android tablet and connect it to the Internet, it’s going to start pulling in all the notifications that you “missed,” even if you already saw all those notifications on your Android phone.

If your tablet isn’t muted, you’ll hear its notification tone for every single notification that it pulls in, which could be a little or a lot. Even if it is muted, though, it might vibrate like wild if it has a haptic motor, which could be annoying if it’s in your hands. I don’t know if many of you reading this article have ever had this happen to you before, but as a tech reviewer with a lot of Android devices lying around, this happens a lot to me. I’d like to imagine some people at Google got fed up with this happening to them, too, because a fix for this issue has just been deployed in the latest Android 15 QPR1 beta.

While I was digging through Android 15 QPR1 Beta 2, I discovered an interesting behavior change: Android now rejects notifications that are more than two weeks old. Notifications that are more than two weeks old will no longer alert you by playing a sound or vibrating the device. Even the contents of old notifications won’t be shown, though some details will remain so you know what apps or contacts to check up on.

Now, you might be wondering how a notification can be considered old if it only appears when you boot up a device, but the reason is quite simple.

In the notifications panel, Android shows you how long ago a notification was posted. It determines this by comparing the timestamp of when the notification was sent to the current time. For the many notifications that come through Google’s push notifications service, i.e. Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), the time they were sent is the time that, say, someone sent you a reply in a messaging app, not the time the actual notification appears in the notifications panel. And because FCM queues up notifications on a per-device basis, it’ll send out a big batch of notifications all at once if you haven’t booted up your device in a while.

Since Android 15 QPR1 now rejects notifications that are more than two weeks old, though, that big batch of notifications that FCM sends out will no longer cause an avalanche of pings. This is a great change that I hope solves the old notification spam problem for good.

Google is also working on other ways to make notifications less annoying on Android. For example, the company is working on a way to sync notification dismissals across Android devices as well as a notification cooldown feature that stops successive notifications in a short period from pinging the device. It’s also experimenting with changing up how notifications are shown in the status bar, though it’s unlikely it’ll actually go through with this change.