Reduce Alerts Among Your Pixel Devices With Notification Syncing

I remember actually being excited when I got a smartphone that could check email. I imagined a future life of supercharged productivity, in which I triaged all my incoming messages while brushing my teeth or sitting on the bus. When I actually got to my desk, I thought, I could do some proper work that wasn't just sifting through emails.

These days of course, my feelings are a little different. We're all constantly bombarded with notifications every day—from multiple email apps, and all the rest—and today I appreciate time away from the frequent pings and buzzes.

Google has introduced a small but helpful tweak in Android 15 for Pixels that helps to reduce notification overload: It means that when you dismiss an alert on one Pixel phone or tablet, you're not going to then see it again on another one.

Setting up the feature

You'll find the new feature in notification settings. Credit: Lifehacker

Assuming all of your Pixel devices are updated to the latest Android 15 version, you may well see a notification on one or more of them asking if you want to enable the feature. If you've dismissed the notification or it doesn't show up at all, you can head to Settings and choose Notifications > Dismiss notifications across Pixel devices to find it.

This is a quick tweak and there's not much in the way of setup required. Turn on the Dismiss on this device, confirm that you give the feature permission to manage your notifications, and you're done. If you're using multiple Google accounts on the same phone or tablet, you can pick the account you want to sync notifications for.

You need to then repeat this process for all of the devices you'd like to keep in sync. If there's a phone or tablet you want to make sure you always get notifications on, no matter what you're doing on your other devices, leave this option switched off. If you'd rather go back to the standard approach, just turn off the toggle switch again.

One important caveat to bear in mind: All your devices need to be connected to wifi for the notifications to be universally dismissed. If you're out and about with your phone on a cellular network, the syncing isn't going to kick in until you connect to wifi at home or somewhere else.

Managing notification syncing

You can always retrieve your notification history on any device. Credit: Lifehacker

I gave this a try using two Pixel phones (being a tech journalist with a lot of phones on hand), but it's going to be most useful when you've got a Pixel phone and a Pixel tablet—you won't then be dismissing notifications on one gadget and then having to go all the way through them again on another.

With all your phones and tablets signed up for the sync program, your notifications work as if you were just handling one device: An email alert might pop up on both phone and tablet, for example, but if you swipe it away or press on it to read the message then the notification vanishes on your other devices.

If you think you're worried you must have missed something along the way, Pixel devices have a handy notification history feature you can use as a safety net. Open Notifications from Settings, then choose Notification history. From here you can enable the feature (if it isn't already) and see recently dismissed notifications.

It's certainly cut down on the number of distracting alerts I've heard in the background while I've been trying to get work done, and it's something I'm always going to keep switched on with multiple Pixels around. Hopefully, it'll be something that comes to Android more widely in the future, so all phones and tablets are included.

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