Android 15, end your notification nightmare

opinion: Pixel owners can now download the first Android 15 public beta. I don’t usually rush to download these pre-launch software updates despite owning a Pixel smartphone, but this time is different because of the promise of being able to control notifications.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve become increasingly frustrated by the number of notifications I receive. If you don’t open your phone for an hour or so, a long list of notifications will pop up and fill up your phone’s news feed.

It takes me so long to scroll through these notifications that I usually end up clearing them all, at the risk of missing out on the big BBC news headlines and injury updates before the fantasy football deadline. There are many things.

Part of this is my own fault. Android gives you the option to disable notifications for certain apps, so you need to do some spring cleaning. After all, there’s really no need for Domino’s to remind you about the latest pizza deals every week.

However, my biggest complaint concerns the number of notifications I receive from each app per day. You don’t want to disable notifications from The Athletic in case important news about your favorite football team pops up, but Android says you’ll receive about 10 notifications a day from this one app. You say there are, but this is too many.

Athletics aren’t the only ones guilty. According to my boyfriend’s Pixel smartphone, on average he receives about 105 notifications a day. No wonder I tend to delete notifications rather than read them.

Fortunately, Google is promising to reduce this notification deluge with the introduction of Android 15, which offers a new notification cooldown feature. This will obviously reduce the amount of continuous notifications from the same app and allow you to continue receiving notifications from your favorite apps without getting spammed.

While this is a step in the right direction, we feel there is still room for improvement when it comes to notifications. We are now entering the era of on-device artificial intelligence. I hope Google can develop a smarter filtering system for notifications.

Ideally, by registering my action, Android would be able to tell me if I’m interested in a notification, whether it’s a quick delete or a click-through to see more information about a particular headline. You need to be able to determine whether I should then be able to react accordingly and show more or less notifications depending on my level of interest. This will greatly improve your experience using your Android smartphone.

I’m also frustrated that there are so many apps that can send me notifications on a regular basis even though I rarely use them. Threads, Bing, and BeReal all send weekly notifications, but I can’t remember the last time I opened one of these apps. Of course, you can manually disable notifications for these apps yourself, but it would be nice if Android could take care of this for you.

When we discuss AI in smartphones, we usually focus on grandiose features like the ability to easily erase an ex from a photo. But realistically, I think there are many other Android users who experience the same notification nightmare that I do, so most people would actually benefit from intelligent notifications.