We’ve all been there. Trying to lock in on an important task, and at the worst possible time, the group chat pops off. BZZT. BZZT. BZZ-ZZT.
Message after message, followed by a couple of emails, and then a DoorDash coupon pops up to tempt you in your darkest hour.
You want to just turn off all notifications, but that may not be practical for you.
You don’t want to break your focus by opening your phone to mute separate conversations, and you also don’t want to mute any one app altogether.
7 ways to customize your Android notifications for a distraction-free life
Stay in control of your notifications
Here’s where Google’s Notification cooldown feature should come in
Google’s Notification cooldown feature should have been the perfect solution.
It was introduced with Android 15 in October 2024, and it claimed it would reduce the appearance, sound, and vibration intensity for repetitive notifications for up to one minute, excluding phone calls, alarms, and priority conversations.
Android Authority’s Ryan Haines aptly described Notification cooldown as “a very temporary, very automatic mute switch.”
That’s probably the exact vibe Google was going for with this feature, but I think it missed the mark for a couple of reasons.
It’s not far off from being awesome, and some small changes would help a lot.
Customization Options
On or off is simply not enough
Currently, Notification cooldown only has one toggle: on or off.
Normally, I love that level of simplicity, but I need a bit more nuance with my notifications. I think the user should be able to apply it to specific apps, like Discord and WhatsApp.
My family are a bunch of night owls who live overseas. They are often chit-chatting in the middle of my workday, and a couple of my group chats with my friends are liable to blow up pretty much any minute, overflowing with memes and outrageous work anecdotes.
The new notification organization in Android 16 has changed my life
I’ve never known peace like this
That’s the perfect time for Notification cooldown!
I want those first couple of notifications so I can decide if it’s something I want to address now or later. Then, if it’s not urgent, I don’t have to bother going in and manually muting the conversation.
Inversely, I don’t typically get a lot of text messages throughout the day. If I’m getting an influx of messages, there’s a good chance they’re urgent, and I need to see them quickly. I don’t want them minimized at all.
It would also be helpful to be able to choose how many notifications come through before they get muted altogether, and how long they stay muted.
It seems like it mutes after about three or four notifications by default.
I don’t want that many notifications before muting a less important conversation. One or two is enough.
Cooldown will minimize notifications for up to one minute, but if your group chat is very active for an extended period of time, you’re still going to get a few notifications every minute, which is a lot.
The user should be able to adjust how much time will pass before receiving notifications again.
It would be nice if it … worked?
Call me crazy, I guess
I did some tests with Notification cooldown, and it didn’t actually work the way it was supposed to.
Using my partner’s phone, I sent over 130 messages to myself in quick succession, some with Cooldown on, and some with it off. The results were confusing.
The first few message notifications definitely got a little quieter, and then a few of them were muted, as expected.
But within about 10 seconds, they were back to full volume and vibration intensity.
I thought maybe my message thread with my partner was considered a priority conversation, but I checked, and I don’t have any priority conversations specified, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t be minimizing those notifications for the entire minute.
Now, even with the functionality being quite hit or miss, it was an improvement from not having Notification Cooldown on at all.
Those notifications were loud and intense the whole time. So it’s not that the feature doesn’t work, it just doesn’t seem to work as described.
How to try Notification cooldown for yourself
Maybe your experience will be better than mine
Follow these steps to turn on Notification cooldown on your device.
- Open Settings.
- Select Notifications.
- Scroll down to General.
-
Select Notification cooldown.
-
Toggle the switch to ON, if it isn’t on already.
In Android’s Settings menu, you can also just use the search bar to find what you need a little more quickly.
Searching for cooldown will pull up the toggle you need for this setting.
Notification cooldown may not be great right now
But it certainly could be with some changes
For now, I’ll stick to manually adjusting my notification settings across my apps, and temporarily muting conversations when necessary.
I’m checking my phone regularly enough that I don’t miss much anyway.
I see the vision. It’s an excellent idea, and with some added customization options and improvements to the general functionality of Notification cooldown, it could easily become one of my favorite Android features.
