Android 15 lets you sync notification dismissals across Pixel devices — here’s how

If you use an Android tablet from time to time, you’re probably familiar with the problem of duplicate notifications. Notifications that you’ve already viewed and dismissed on your Android phone will continue to appear on your Android tablet unless you also delete them on your Android tablet. While this is certainly a minor annoyance, it makes Android feel like a disparate ecosystem. Luckily, Google has a solution to duplicate notifications in the Android 15 update it’s releasing today, but you’ll need a Pixel device to take advantage of it.

With the stable Android 15 update that Google released today for Pixel devices, the company is introducing a new “Dismiss notifications across Pixel devices” option. Settings > Notifications. The feature is available on Pixel 6 and later (including Pixel tablets), and its description says, “Notifications that are cleared on your Pixel phone or tablet will no longer appear on both.” Tapping the option will open a page where you can enable the feature for one (but not all) of your Google accounts.

To enable this feature, you must first grant the Device Connectivity Services app permission to access notifications. Device Connectivity Services is a Pixel-only system app that supposedly handles this notification syncing feature. Use Android’s notification listener API to read and ignore notifications on behalf of the user. Access to this API is managed by [設定]>[アプリ]>[特別なアプリ アクセス]>[通知の既読、返信、制御].

According to Google, the feature will only reject notifications if each Pixel device that has the feature enabled is connected to Wi-Fi. This feature probably won’t drain much battery life, but since most people leave their tablets at home, it makes sense to only run them when the device is connected to Wi-Fi. If Google has a 5G version of the Pixel Tablet, I would argue that Google should add an option to enable this feature when using mobile data. However, since this is not the case, there is no point in adding such an option.

That said, it’s a bit disappointing that this notification sync feature is limited to Pixel devices. When we first saw evidence of this feature in the second beta of Android 15 QPR1, we weren’t sure if it was available on all Android devices or only on Pixel devices. Google recently started rolling out a suite of cross-device services that improve integration regardless of the brand of Android device, so it makes perfect sense for this feature to be added to that suite. Still, if you have a Pixel tablet and a Pixel smartphone, you’ll probably find this new feature in the Android 15 update very useful.