Android’s notification management system has already come a long way, but it may get even better with the next major OS update, Android 15. Google may make it easier to deal with notification spam on Android 15.
In the Android 15 beta 1, Mishaal Rahmaan, an expert in Android, activated certain hidden flags. These flags automatically hide notification channels that apps don’t use. Inside an app’s notification settings, there is a new option called “show unused channels” which can be accessed through the three-dot button menu on the top right. The shorter list will display only the channels that an app has used for notifications, making it easier to identify which ones you want to disable.
As an example, Rahmaan talks about how Instagram uses 25 notification channels, many of which are hardly used. This makes it difficult to identify which ones need to be disabled. Through the newly discovered feature in Android 15, users can considerably shorten the list and find the right notification channels to deactivate.
Since the feature is hidden underneath a drop-down menu, there has been speculation that Google may not include this feature in the final release of Android 15. However, given that the feature is already working as intended, Rahmaan believes that Google has little reason to remove the feature later on. There’s a possibility that Google will officially introduce this notification channel enhancement during its keynote at Google I/O next month.
If Google does allow control over notification channels, it would give Android another edge against iOS and its notification system, which already lags behind Android.
