Android 15 update disables old notification sounds — finally some peace!

Android does a lot of things right when it comes to handling notifications, like merging notifications, showing smart replies, letting you reply inline, and more. However, many people still find some things about notifications on Android annoying. One example is how the operating system handles, or rather doesn’t handle, old notifications. Thankfully, the latest beta Android 15 Finally, there’s a solution to the old notification spam.

Imagine this: An old or second-hand Android tablet you only use it occasionally, like when you’re on vacation. You keep it off when you’re not using it to preserve its battery, so you can go days or even weeks between uses. The next time you start up your Android tablet and connect it to the internet, it will start receiving all the notifications you “missed”, even if you’ve already seen them on your computer. Android phone.

If your tablet isn’t on silent, you’ll hear the notification tone for every notification it receives; this can be a little or a lot. But even if it’s on silent, it can vibrate wildly if it’s in your hand because it has a haptic motor, which can be annoying. I don’t know if many of you reading this have ever had this happen to you before, but as a tech reviewer with a lot of Android devices around, it happens to me a lot. I imagine some folks at Google are sick of this happening to them too, because a fix for this issue was recently released in the Android 15 QPR1 beta.

While I was digging Android 15 QPR1 Beta 2I discovered an interesting behavioral change: Android now rejects notifications older than two weeks. Notifications older than two weeks will no longer alert you by playing a sound or vibrating the device. The contents of old notifications will not even be displayed, but some details will remain so you know which apps or contacts to check.

Now, you might be wondering how a notification that only appears when you start the device can be considered old, but the reason for this is quite simple.

In the notification panel, Android shows you how long ago a notification was sent. It determines this by comparing the timestamp of when the notification was sent to the current time. For many notifications that come through Google’s push notification service, Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), the time they were sent—for example, when someone sent you a reply in a messaging app—is not the time the actual notification appears in the notification panel. And because FCM queues notifications on a per-device basis, it can send a large group of notifications at once if you haven’t launched your device in a while.

Android 15 QPR1 now rejects notifications older than two weeks, so the large batch of notifications sent by FCM will no longer cause an avalanche of pings. This is a great change that I hope will completely fix the old notification spam problem.