Google wants to make Gmail notifications less redundant

If you find that getting the same Gmail notification on your Chromebook and mobile device at the same time is an annoyance, you’ll be happy to know that may be changing soon. 9to5Google discovered what seems to be a test roll-out of a feature that pauses notifications on your phone when it detects that you are using the desktop version of Gmail. You will know if this feature has been pushed to your account if you receive a popup like the one below stating:

Pause mobile notifications while you’re using this device

To pause Gmail mobile notifications while you’re active on this device, allow your browser to detect if you’re active or away. Click Continue and then Allow when prompted by your browser.

Clicking on “Continue” will invoke a Chrome permissions prompt asking to grant mail.google.com access to know when you’re actively using the device. However, as 9to5 explains, there has been no official announcement from Google just yet about the availability of this new feature. Additionally, there are no specific user controls at this point, nor is there a clear way to disengage it unless you remove the permissions in Chrome altogether.

It will be interesting to see if Google sticks to this approach as part of the new Gmail redesign that I am so anxiously waiting to hit my account. If this feature works as intended, I do hope there are plans to make it work the other way around as well. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve logged in to my Chromebook only to be bombarded with a slew of notifications that I’ve already seen and read on my mobile device. Have you come across this feature on your Gmail yet? Let us know in the comments below if you think this will be beneficial for your use case.