As discovered by journalist Mishaal Rahman (via AndroidPolice) and shared by him on X, Android 14 will give users the ability to take away permission that was granted to certain apps to show full-screen notifications. Apps use the USE_FULL_SCREEN_INTENT permission to cover a smartphone’s display with a notification and in some cases, such as with clock or phone apps, that is perfectly acceptable since you’d want to know when a timer or alarm is up, or when you have an incoming call-especially with the screen off.

In Android 14, users will be able to deny the aforementioned permission to prevent other apps from pushing out full-screen ads to their screens. There are other ways that advertisers can still blanket your phone’s display with a full-screen popup ad, but taking away the USE_FULL_SCREEN_INTENT permission is one thing that users can do to reduce the number of times such content hits their phones. 

While Google is giving Android users the ability to manually revoke the USE_FULL_SCREEN_INTENT permission, later this year Google will stop giving apps you’ve just installed for the first time this permission by default except for phone dialer apps and alarm clock apps. Please note that any apps you’ve installed on your Android phone prior to the release of Android 14 will require you to manually revoke the permission if you want to stop them from covering your screen with notifications/ads.

Just the other day we told you that Google had released Android 14 Beta 5 and the next Android update pushed out by the company could very well be the stable and final version of Android 14. Once you install that update, that will be the time to go through your apps to pull the USE_FULL_SCREEN_INTENT permission from those that you don’t want bothering you with full-page content.

Based on Rahman’s post on X, a menu titled Manage full-screen intents will apparently be accessible from the Android Settings page and a list of a user’s installed apps will be underneath. Tapping on the name of one app brings up a page with a toggle that says “Allow apps to send full-screen intents.” On the bottom of the page, you can read, “Allow this app to send full-screen intent notifications that cover the entire screen.” Keeping the toggle off means that you are not giving the app permission to send you a full-screen notification/ad while turning the toggle on will allow the app to fill your screen with an ad or a notification.