Key Takeaways
- Android 15 will deliver small but meaningful upgrades, not a complete overhaul.
- An excellent feature was “Notification Cooldown” to lower repeated notifications volume.
- Google removed the Cooldown feature from Android 15 betas but may reintroduce it later.
Google’s next big update for our phones, Android 15, sounds exciting so far but won’t bring a huge list of changes. We’re getting small, meaningful upgrades rather than a complete overhaul. Unfortunately, my favorite feature is already missing from the latest betas.
After playing with the early Android 15 developer previews from February and March, we noticed several exciting features and quality-of-life changes. Perhaps the best new feature is what Google calls “Notification Cooldown.”
It’s safe to assume we’ve all experienced moments when we get far too many notifications. That’s especially true with group chats, Twitter, Slack, Asana, Facebook Messenger, etc., where a barrage of messages go off, making a ton of noise and vibrating our phones like crazy. My family has a big group chat that randomly starts getting active and has me reaching for the phone to mute everything.
That’s where Android 15’s Notification Cooldown feature comes in (or did), and here’s how Google explained it: “Notification Cooldown will gradually lower the notification volume when you get many successive notifications from the same app.”
In practice, after the first alert or notification goes off, Android 15 dramatically lowers the volume and vibration intensity if another one comes in too quickly. Then, if notifications continue to arrive from that same app or chat, they’ll slowly get quieter so I don’t go insane. You can enable it for all notifications or specifically for conversations. Basically, it clusters the pings together and lowers the volume. I love it, or at least I did.
Of course, we don’t want to miss important messages from the boss or a co-worker, so the “cooldown” period is relatively short. After a few minutes of silence, the volume will revert to regular levels if another notification comes in, so you don’t miss anything.
Cooldown sounds fantastic, right? We all doom scroll far too much or get too many notifications, and this could alleviate some of the pain or distractions, whether from our phones or someone else at the office. Phones that understand annoyances and tone alerts down automatically—sign me up!
Unfortunately, Google has already killed the feature and removed it from Android 15, at least for now. It was in the early developer previews but disappeared from the first beta, and it isn’t available in the latest Android 15 beta 2.
Did Google scrap this entirely? Who knows? The search giant did make improvements to Notification Cooldown during the developer period, like tweaks to vibrations, so there is a chance the removal was only to improve things before bringing it back. Google could be working on it behind the scenes and testing different ways to make cooldowns more effective. If so, maybe it’ll be reintroduced when Android 15 officially arrives later this year for Pixels, Galaxy phones, and more.
It’s no secret that Google tends to kill software, services, apps, or products at any moment, and nothing is ever guaranteed. However, this wouldn’t be the first time a feature gets showcased in an early version of Android, goes away, and comes back as something else entirely or with a fancy new name.
Hey Google, “Notification Cooldown” might be Android 15’s best feature, so please bring it back.
