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Android 15 QPR2 is preparing a new way to declutter your lock screen notifications
- Google is working on a new lock screen notification minimalism feature for Android.
- When enabled, this will shrink notifications so only their icons will show on the lock screen.
- We spotted this feature in the first Android 15 QPR2 beta, but it’s not live yet.
It’s convenient to have your notifications appear on the lock screen, but on the other hand, they can really mess with its aesthetics. That’s because notifications take up a lot of space, so they easily obscure whatever wallpaper you’ve chosen. You can easily disable notifications from appearing on the lock screen, but then you have to unlock your device before you can read any. Fortunately, Google is working on a new feature in the second quarterly release of Android 15 that could solve this issue.
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Hidden within Android 15 QPR2 Beta 1 is a new feature that can declutter your lock screen without forcing you to unlock your phone to see your notifications. This feature is called lock screen notification minimalism and, when it goes live, can be found under Settings > Notifications. The description for the feature states that it makes fewer notifications show up on the lock screen, but in our brief testing, it doesn’t seem like it actually reduces the total number of notifications that appear there.
<string name="lock_screen_notif_minimalism">Lock screen notification minimalism</string>
<string name="lock_screen_notif_minimalism_summary">Show fewer notifications on lock screen</string>Rather, the lock screen notification minimalism feature seems to hide everything but the icons for notifications. 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, notifications are shown in their entirety on the lock screen. You can see the full card for each notification, which includes the app or conversation icon, title, and body. When this setting is enabled, however, only the app icon is shown in a small pill below the clock. Tapping this pill expands the notifications panel so you can see the entire content of each notification. While this lock screen notification minimalism feature does make it slightly less convenient to see your notifications, it significantly declutters your lock screen so you can see the beautiful wallpaper you set for it.
If you’ve disabled lock screen notifications entirely because you didn’t like how they look, then you’ll want to give this new lock screen notification minimalism feature a try once it rolls out. Unfortunately, I don’t yet know when Google will actually roll it out. Although I first spotted this feature in Android 15 QPR2 Beta 1, it’s possible Google will reserve it for the upcoming Android 16 release or even for a later release. Given how small of a change this is, though, I don’t see any reason we have to wait that long. If it does land in Android 16, though, it will join another lock screen-related change that I recently spotted, namely a feature that automatically hides some sensitive content from the lock screen.