Android P will offer to hide any notifications it suspects of annoying you, with the new feature recently being discovered in the first developer preview of Google’s latest mobile operating system. The functionality appears to be looking for particular notifications you often dismiss, then starts labeling them with an attention-grabbing red icon that can be seen in the gallery below. Tapping the icon in the notification panel will present you with another prompt that asks whether you want to permanently stop the possibly annoying app from delivering notifications going forward. Taking the feature up on its offer will automatically disable the notification channel in question, with the move being reversible through the system Settings app, just like any other notification preference.
It’s presently unclear how many manual dismissals trigger the label and whether Android P simply keeps track of their total amount or their number relative to the volume of notifications you ended up opening, and if also takes the length of time between individual dismissals into account before deciding whether to serve the suggestion to hide potentially annoying notifications. The feature reportedly cannot be disabled in the first developer preview of the new Android build, though there are still no guarantees it will make it to the stable channel. The newly discovered behavior is just one of many additions and optimizations Android P introduces to improve the notification management of Android 8.0 Oreo. The recently debuted OS also supports system-wide notification channel preferences, allowing users to enable or block certain types of notifications such as promotions across all apps with a single command instead of having to resort to preventing them manually on a per-app basis. Support for saving quick reply drafts and sending images from the notification panel is also part of the package, as is a new method for identifying and labeling group chats and their participants from the same interface.
Google is planning to push its new mobile OS through four more developer previews until launching it in the form of a stable update in the third quarter of the year, according to the company’s official Android P roadmap. The second experimental build of the software is scheduled to debut in early May, most likely at the next iteration of Google’s annual I/O developer conference.
