Android 16’s notification cooldown feature will save you from notification spam

Google just released the first developer preview of Android 16 today, which surprised many people as developer previews of major Android releases usually don’t drop before February. However, Google is shifting Android’s launch schedule forward, which is why DP1 is here so early. You might think that because DP1 is here already that it doesn’t have any exciting new features, but you’d be wrong. For example, DP1 finally delivers the long-awaited notification cooldown feature that will save you from notification spam.

After installing Android 16 DP1 on my Pixel 9 Pro, I noticed that there was now a new toggle to enable notification cooldown under Settings > Notifications > Notification cooldown. This feature, when enabled, gradually lowers the volume of successive notifications that come from the same app. In other words, notification cooldown prevents your phone from blaring its notification tone wildly when you receive a ton of notifications in a very short time.

According to the description of the notification cooldown feature in Android 16 DP1, the feature will lower your device’s volume as well as minimize alerts for “up to two minutes.” However, important notifications from “calls, alarms, and priority conversations are not affected.”

Originally, we thought the notification cooldown feature would be part of the Android 15 update as we first spotted it in Android 15 DP1. However, Google hid the feature in the first public beta of Android 15 and didn’t bring it back for the stable release. There were concerns that the feature had been abandoned, but thankfully, we confirmed that wasn’t the case when we spotted that more work had been done on it in Android 15 QPR1 Beta 2.

Compared to the previous iteration of the notification cooldown feature, the version that’s live in Android 16 DP1 only lets you toggle it on or off. In the past, you could choose to apply a cooldown to all notifications or only conversation notifications. With this change, notifications from your most important contacts won’t be silenced by the feature, so you won’t miss any important messages.

One feature we were hoping to see go live with the public rollout of notification cooldown is the toggle to stop your phone from vibrating like crazy. We’re not sure why that feature isn’t also available with this release, and the description of the notification cooldown feature doesn’t say that it also stops notifications from making your phone vibrate.

In any case, this is only the first developer preview of Android 16. There’s still another developer preview followed by four betas before the stable release of Android 16 in Q2 2025, so it’s possible that Google will still make changes to how notification cooldown works.