For the longest time, you couldn't control any of the notifications coming on your phone from Android itself. Things like apps running in the background or using battery, networks alerts or your VPN status had to stay there front and center in your notifications until you dismissed them. Then with Oreo's notification channels, you could at least lower the importance of a notification so it didn't take precious space in your drop-down. Oreo 8.1 also introduced one neat change: you could disable notifications for apps running in the background, but that was the only one to be turned off completely.

With Android P DP1, all of Android System and System UI's notifications became togglable. You could turn any of them completely off. DP2 is changing that again, only giving you the choice to disable a few of the notifications. So let's take a look.

For System UI notifications, DP2 adds a new Hints channel and, compared to DP1, leaves you the option to turn off two channels only: Battery and Screenshots. I assume the battery one is the notification that gets triggered when you reach the low battery threshold. The screenshot one is obvious.

System UI notification channels in Android 8.1 (left), P DP1 (middle), P DP2 (right).

For Android System notifications, there are more differences to discuss. First, there are three new channels: App running, Do Not Disturb, and System changes. Second, Oreo 8.1 didn't let you toggle any of them off, DP1 allowed all of them to be turned off, and DP2 now only leaves you with a few channels you can switch off: Car mode, Developer messages, Network alerts, Network available, Physical keyboard, and Virtual keyboard.

Android System's notification channels in Android 8.1 (left), P DP1 (middle), and P DP2 (right).

So from now on if you get an annoying notification in Android P that you previously thought you couldn't dismiss or completely block, make sure you check the System UI and Android System's channels to see if you can disable it.