It took Google years to add this Android 15 feature and it’s still sketchy

If there’s one feature that’s been at the top of my Android wish list for nearly a decade, it’s notification syncing across devices. I realize my use case is extreme as I have several Android phones I have a lot more on my desk and in my gadget drawer now, but there was a time when I only had a phone and a tablet and I was still tired of seeing duplicate notifications on both.

But rejecting notifications on phones is finally here Android15! Well, scratch that. If you have a Pixel 6 or newer, it’s here because it’s only available as one version. Pixel-specific option. This is one of the first limitations of the option for me. The other is more… complicated.

Yes, turn off recurring notifications It’s available on my Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro Fold, Pixel 7 Pro, and Pixel Tablet, but everything else is left out. My Galaxy S24 Ultra, Nothing Phone 2, and a few other test devices don’t work together. So every time I pick up or open notifications, I get a bunch of notifications and I have to wait a minute or two before doing anything else. It doesn’t matter that I’ve already rejected these on my Pixel devices; They will still be with me on my other phones.

And look, once again I know I’m in an extreme situation, but if I only had a Pixel phone and a Galaxy Tab, or a OnePlus phone and a Pixel Tablet, I’d still be in that complicated situation where one device wants to do this. If it syncs the notification status while the other cannot, the whole feature becomes useless to me. You really need to go all-in on nothing but Pixels to take advantage.

We can now hope that Google will strengthen its own Pixel brand by keeping this feature exclusive, but then it needs to roll it out to more Android phones. At least that’s what’s already happened with a few other Pixel exclusives, and I think that’ll be the case here as well.

Even though this setting will soon become widespread throughout the Android ecosystem, there is another limitation that bothers me equally. The option to sync notification rejection is limited to a single Google account, and I can’t find Google’s documentation to understand what exactly this means.

I have three Google accounts: personal account, work account and joint account with my wife. They all serve different purposes and have separate email communications, calendars, bookmarks, map locations, etc. has. In fact, when I install applications, I make sure that I download them from the correct Play Store account. new Android apps (Asana and Slack from my work account, Instagram from my personal account, Amazon and Uber from my joint account – you get the gist).

So what exactly do I get, or don’t get, by choosing one account or the other? Common sense says it shouldn’t matter which account I choose: As long as it’s the same account and linked to all my Pixel phones, it should work on all phones, apps, and notifications. Right?

So far, I’ve found that even with Google’s own apps signed in with the same account, duplicate notifications still pop up on my Pixel Tablet after I dismiss them on my phone. So either the feature isn’t fully rolled out (we’ve seen this before) cross-device synchronizationwhere the setting pops up weeks before the feature actually starts working) or there are some account-based limitations that I’m not aware of.

But I’m afraid this account selector means something else. Maybe only emails, calendar events, missed Meet calls, Photos memories, etc. from the same Google account. Synchronizes dismissal of notifications for So if I choose my personal email, I will still receive copies of my work and couple’s email notifications. Ha. Worse still, it may only work on apps I’m signed into with my personal Google account, or apps connected to my personal Google Play Store. Maybe it doesn’t even work in third-party applications; I don’t know!

It is clear that Google needs to better explain this feature, what we should expect from it and why we should choose a Google account. Is this just a way to link all the two phones’ notifications together, or does it pick and choose which notifications to sync and which to copy? And if it is supposed to be functional, then something is off and not working. Or, if it’s not live or functional, then it’s time for developers to avoid revealing settings for features that don’t work yet, lest people like me get confused wondering why something isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do.

And perhaps all these glitches are why we don’t see this feature coming to all Android yet. So yes, I would like to see this rolled out widely across the ecosystem once all the issues are resolved. Until then, here’s another sad sigh for a promise not quite fulfilled.