How to silence Googlebook mirrored phone notifications without turning off sync

Over the last couple of weeks in our studio, pairing my phone with our test Googlebooks has been one of the biggest workflow highlights on Googlebook OS. Once Google resolved the initial pairing bugs and we got Better Together running smoothly on Galaxy hardware, having text messages, phone calls, and two-factor verification codes pop up on the desktop of all the Googlebooks was pretty sweet.

There was just one glaring problem: my laptop was suddenly getting bombarded by every single ping my phone received. Even worse, I was getting duplicate notifications directly from my phone and from the apps I have actually installed on the Googlebook.

For instance, every time a WhatsApp message arrived, I got the notification from my phone that would take me to the phone streaming version of WhatsApp on top of the notification from the instance of WhatsApp I have installed on the Googlebook. Of course, for any app I have installed on the laptop, I don’t want or need notifications from the app streaming connection between my phone and laptop.

Many early adopters thought they had to choose between this flood of notifications or or disabling phone sync altogether to maintain some sanity. Thankfully, as pointed out by Mishaal Rahman in a helpful r/Googlebook community discussion, there is a clever hidden setting inside Googlebook OS that lets you silence the notifications from your phone that you simply don’t need on your Googlebook.

Why Googlebook notification mirroring feels so overwhelming at first

On traditional ChromeOS, Google’s Phone Hub was relatively restrained, focusing primarily on incoming text messages and a handful of supported communication apps. On Googlebook OS, however, the platform leverages Android 17’s full Cross-Device Services framework, which mirrors notifications from practically every application installed on your handset.

Without an obvious filtering tool in the main setup screen, your desktop can quickly turn into a chaotic notification center that derails your focus pretty quickly.

The good news is that because Googlebook OS is built on modern Android foundations, it natively supports Android’s granular notification channels. Google simply tucked the management controls into a background system service rather than placing them front and center in the main settings shade. That was a mistake in my opinion, but at least there is a fix to clean things up.

How to selectively mute mirrored apps

To prune your mirrored notifications and stop specific apps from interrupting your work, you just need to access the notification categories assigned to Google’s cross-device background engine. Here is the step-by-step path to customize your alerts directly on your Googlebook:

1. Open your system settings
2. Click on Apps in the left-hand navigation menu, then select See all apps.
3. Click the three-dot overflow menu in the top-right corner of the window and select Show system.
4. Scroll down through the alphabetical list or type into the search bar at the top to find and click on Cross-Device Services.
5. Open notifications and then click the Other dropdown.
6. Toggle off and apps that you don’t need notifications from via your phone.

If you prefer to make adjustments without digging into system apps on your laptop, you can also manage permissions directly from your Android phone. On recent Pixel and Galaxy devices running Android 17, heading to Settings > Connected devices > Better Together > Notification sync provides a cleaner mobile interface to select which applications are permitted to broadcast alerts to your laptop.

Keep in mind that if an app has not sent an alert since you paired your devices, it might not appear in the notification channel list immediately. Once an application pushes its first notification across the wireless bridge, Googlebook OS registers it as a distinct channel, allowing you to mute it permanently going forward. So you may need to clean this up a couple times.

While I’m glad for this workaround, this is yet another place where Google should have cleaned things up prior to launch. The system should have a better way to deal with notifications from your phone without forcing users to dig so deep into their settings.

I’m not sure on the best way to do this, but Googlebook OS should most definitely find those duplicated apps that are on both the laptop and phone and make certain those notifications always route back to the installed laptop app, not phone streaming by default. Here’s hoping for a cleanup on this part of the experience very soon.