Google has quietly put a lot of work into notifications withAndroid 14. Nothing major, but the smaller things add up: ringtones and notification sounds are gettingseparate volume sliders, you canhide notifications in screen recordingsnow, and there’s even an accessibility setting thatuses your camera flash for alerts. But the single biggest change is the fact that all notifications — even the persistent and ongoing ones — can now be swiped away. As it turns out, this has some implications for alarms, too.
TheGoogle Clockapp in Android 14 Beta 3 now lets you dismiss alarms by just swiping the notification away. A hint on the notification that appears when your alarm goes off while the screen is on invites you to “Swipe to stop” — doing so is the same as dismissing an alarm, so one swipe and the alarm will stop blaring. Using the same exact version of the Google Clock app (v7.5) on Android 13 will give youSnoozeandStopbuttons in the notification, but the notification itself will not be dismissible.
Google Clock’s alarm notification in Android 14(left)vs. Android 13(right)
This addition is thanks toa new Android 14 changethat allows you to swipe away notifications even if they’re normally persistent or non-dismissible. The “Clear all” button won’t clear these away from the notification shade or the lock screen, but swiping an individual notification now dismisses it even if the app’s developer coded it as a foreground notification, which is the case with alarms.
With this change, Google had to decide what should happen when a user swipes away an alarm notification, and it seems as though the company landed on dismissing the alarm. Interestingly, this is also what happens when you swipe away an expired timer notification, but these don’t have the hint letting you know that you can “Swipe to stop.”
To be clear, this “Swipe to stop” gesture is only for the notifications that appear when an alarm or timer is going off while your phone is unlocked — the full-screen UI that appears when your alarm goes off while the screen is off remains unchanged. This also doesn’t apply to the upcoming alarm notifications that appear shortly before your alarm goes off. These notifications have always been dismissible, and doing so has no impact on the upcoming alarm.
The new functionality itself seems to be a bit spotty, however. While it worked consistently in our testing, the reader who first discovered this change noted that swiping to stop didn’t actually stop their alarm. So this is a work-in-progress as we write this, but we’re hopeful that as the Android 14 final release gets near, the kinks are all ironed out.
