Android 15’s new Adaptive Vibration tool makes receiving notifications more intuitive.
When enabled, adaptive vibration uses your handset’s microphones and other sensors to automatically adjust the vibration strength of notifications based on your environment.
This means that if your phone is, for example, on a hard surface such as your office desk then it will have a more gentle vibration to avoid causing too much disturbance. On the other hand, if your phone is at the bottom of your bag or in your pocket then the vibration will be stronger so you shouldn’t miss your notification.
Keep reading to learn how to use adaptive vibration in Android 15.
What you’ll need
- A smartphone running Android 15 (at the time of writing, only Pixel 7 and later smartphones support this feature.)
The short version:
- Open Settings
- Tap Sound & vibration
- Tap Vibration & haptics
- Tap Adaptive vibration
- Toggle Use adaptive vibration on
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Step
1Open Settings
We’ll demonstrate using a Google Pixel handset, however the steps will be similar on handsets running Android 15.
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Step
2Tap Sound & vibration
Scroll down the Settings page until you find Sound & vibration.
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Step
3Tap Vibration & haptics
You’ll need to scroll down again to find this.
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Step
4Tap Adaptive vibration
This option should be under the Notifications and alarms subheading, below the notification and alarm vibration sliders.
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Step
5Toggle Use adaptive vibration on
Tap the toggle on to enable adaptive vibration.
Troubleshooting
As adaptive vibration uses your phone’s microphone and other sensors to determine sound levels, you may be concerned about your data protection. However, Google assures that “no data is ever recorded.”
At the time of writing only Google Pixel smartphones have access to Android 15. However, we expect Android 15 to roll out to more handsets in the coming weeks, which means all compatible handsets should also receive the feature.
