Android lock screen minimalism option can clear notifications

Having your notifications appear on the lock screen is convenient, but on the other hand, it can spoil the aesthetics. This is because notifications take up a lot of space and hence are easily hidden by your chosen wallpaper. You can easily disable notifications from appearing on the lock screen, but you’ll need to unlock your device before you can read notifications. Luckily, Google is working on a new feature in its second quarterly release. Android15 may solve this problem.

hidden inside Android 15 QPR2 Beta 1 is a new feature that can de-clutter your lock screen without having to unlock your phone to see your notifications. This feature is called lock screen notification minimalism and when it goes live it can be found at: Settings > Notifications. The feature’s description states that it makes fewer notifications appear on the lock screen, but in our brief testing, it doesn’t appear to actually reduce the total number of notifications appearing there.

On the contrary, the lock screen notification minimalism feature seems to hide everything except notification icons. Here’s a comparison of what the lock screen looks like before and after the lock screen notification minimalism feature is enabled:

As you can see, when the feature is disabled, all notifications are shown on the lock screen. You can see the entire card for each notification, which includes the app or conversation icon, title, and text. However, when this setting is enabled, only the app icon is shown in a small pill below the watch. Tapping this pill expands the notifications panel so you can see the full content of each notification. Although this lock screen notification minimalism feature makes seeing your notifications a little less convenient, it significantly reduces the clutter of your lock screen, so you can still see the beautiful wallpaper you set.

If you’ve completely disabled lock screen notifications because you don’t like the way they look, you’ll want to try this new lock screen notification minimalism feature when it launches. Unfortunately, I don’t know yet when Google will roll out this feature. Although I first noticed this feature in Android 15 QPR2 Beta 1, it is possible that Google will reserve this feature for the next version Android16 even for version or later. Considering how small a change this is, I don’t see any reason why we should wait that long. But if it comes to Android 16, there will be another change regarding the lock screen that I noticed recently, namely automatically hides some sensitive content from the lock screen.