Android 15 is making me reconsider my never-vibrate rule

It’s been twenty years since I bought my first phone, and in these twenty years one rule hasn’t changed: no vibration. Ever. No haptic feedback from the keyboard, no vibration on phone calls and certainly no vibration on messages. Every time I bought a new phone, smart or not, I would get annoyed by the constant buzzing in my hands and end up rushing to the settings menu to turn it off. It’s literally one of the first settings I change and the one I never touch again.

So when Android 15 rolled out to my Pixel 9 Pro with a new “Adaptive Vibration” setting, you can imagine my first reaction was to dismiss that as a feature I would – quite literally – never use.

Then I started thinking: I have used adaptive brightness on my Pixels I’ve appreciated the feature for years, which is why I stopped tinkering with my phone’s brightness slider. The normal “auto” setting never worked for me – I still had to constantly reach and change the brightness percentage – but adaptive brightness took over and made manual adjustments a rare occurrence for me. I also kept the adaptive connectivity, charging, and battery enabled on my Pixel and trusted them to manage my phone’s charging, battery consumption, and Wi-Fi and 5G connectivity. So why should I avoid adaptive vibration? Why don’t you give it a chance?

So I came up with a little challenge and experiment for myself: Turn on Adaptive Vibration for a few days and see how much I can live with it or how much I hate it. I promised myself I would do it for a week – seven full days of pure torture, I believed.

Well, here we are, 15 days later, and I just realized that I had kept Adaptive Vibration enabled on my phone. Wait, what?! 20 years of steadfast belief wiped out in two weeks?! Oddly enough, yes.

It turns out that I don’t absolutely loathe the vibrations coming from my phone. However, I unequivocally hate it when they disrupt me. The adaptive setting ensures that they don’t really bother me; they just nudge me with the right amount of force depending on where I am and what I’m doing.

Are you walking down a busy Parisian street and receive a phone call? My phone is about to bounce in my pocket so I know I have to pick it up. Sitting in the peace and quiet of my own home? A soft hum is sufficient. I can’t remember a single time in these two weeks that I got a phone call and thought, “Oh boy, I have to turn this off now!” And I say this because I was in the middle of a move and renovation, so I’m getting a lot more calls than usual. The vibrations didn’t irritate me with any of them.

You’ll notice, though, that I’m not talking about vibration in app notifications; it’s because I silence them all on principle. I don’t need the buzz of a million apps distracting from my work or my life, but I allow the most important ones to take my attention Pixel watch 3. Everything else can wait until I decide I have time to check my phone. That’s part of my own digital detox setup, and it’s not something I was willing to sacrifice for the sake of this experiment. If you keep app notifications enabled, the adaptive setting should work the same way: reducing the buzz in quieter environments and increasing it in busy places.

Yet not everything has been perfect. There have been times over the past two weeks when I’ve definitely noticed something, and that’s in the morning or evening, when it’s super quiet all around me and I’m typing or scrolling. Even the slightest haptic feedback creates a noise that disrupts the silence, and since my husband is a late riser, it causes him to toss and turn. No more answering Slack messages at 7am or scrolling Twitter at 2am or I risk waking him up. I think that’s a good thing for my health, but I’d like to make my own bad choices, so I’ll probably end up turning off the haptic feedback altogether.

Ultimately, I can say that thanks to adaptive vibration, I have partially made peace with my phone’s vibration function. I’ll still keep it on and rely on it for alarms and phone calls, but for apps and haptic feedback, absolute silence is still my best friend.