The Do Not Disturb feature of Android is incredibly useful for those times when, you know, you do not want to be disturbed. The ability to stop the pestering of notification is a welcome option, and Google is looking to make it even more useful.
An upcoming change addresses something Google seemingly forgot to take into account previously – that fact that many people own more than one Android device. Code has been unearthed that shows work is underway on synchronizing Do Not Disturb status across devices.
At the moment there is something of an unhelpful situation. If you own, say, an Android phone and an Android tablet, you need to manually enable Do Not Disturb on both devices if you want a period of peace and quiet. If you fail to do this and only enable Do Not Disturb on your phone, when you settle down to watch a movie, you may well still be interrupted by notification on your tablet – unless you are in a different room, of course.
And this is what Google is looking to do something about. The company has started work on giving users the option of synchronizing Do Not Disturb status across devices. In other words, with this setting enabled, when you enable Do Not Disturb on your phone, it will automatically be enabled on your tablet as well.
This, of course, would be dependent on being signed into the same Google account on different devices, or having some other method of linking two or more devices to you. This is not a completely new idea for Google, as the company has already implemented a similar system of synchronization between some phones paired to smartwatches running Wear OS.
The expansion of this feature was spotted by Android Authority after digging into the code of Google Play Services. The site uncovered references to a setting called “Sync Do Not Disturb across your devices”, and it looks as though Google is planning to integrate the setting into the Handoff set of features.
Google is yet to say anything about the development of the feature, but it is thought that the company is aiming to make this part of the Android 17 release. There is also speculation that in addition to synchronizing Do Not Disturb across Android devices, it could also work with Chromebooks as Google tries to make its software and hardware ecosystem closer in terms of features to that provided by Apple.
Image credit: Android Authority
