It’s been 20 years since I bought my first phone, and not a single rule has changed in these twenty years: no vibration. Without stopping. There’s no haptic feedback from the keyboard, no vibration for phone calls, and absolutely no vibration for messages. Every time I bought a new phone, smart or not, I would get annoyed by the constant buzzing in my hands and would run to the settings menu to disable it. It’s literally one of the first settings I changed and never touched after that.

So when Android15 rolled for me Pixel 9 Pro With a new “Adaptive vibration” setting, you can imagine my initial reaction was to shrug it off as a feature I would literally never use.

Then I started thinking: I Adaptive brightness used I’ve appreciated this feature on my Pixels for years, and that’s why I stopped fiddling 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 the adaptive brightness kicked in and made manual adjustments a rare occurrence for me. I also kept Adaptive connectivity, charging, and battery enabled on my Pixel device and relied on them to manage my phone’s charging, battery drain, Wi-Fi, and 5G connectivity. So why should I avoid Adaptive vibration? Why don’t you give it a try?

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 this for a week; I believed in seven full days of pure torture.

Here we are 15 days later and I just realized I have Adaptive vibration enabled on my phone. Wait, what? Was 20 years of determined conviction wasted in two weeks? Strangely enough, yes.

Turns out I’m definitely not extremely disgusted by the vibrations coming from my phone. But I absolutely hate it when they bother me. The adaptive environment ensures that they don’t really bother me; They nudge me with the appropriate force depending on where I am and what I’m doing.

Making a phone call while walking down a busy street in Paris? My phone is practically jumping in my pocket, so I know I have to grab it. Am I sitting in the quiet of my own home? A slight buzz is sufficient. I remember getting one phone call in those two weeks saying, “Oh, boy, I have to hang up on this now!” I don’t remember thinking. And I say this is in the middle of a move and remodel, so I’m getting a lot more calls than usual. Vibration didn’t bother me on any of these.

But you’ll notice that I’m not talking about app notification vibrations; because on principle I completely silence them all. I don’t need the buzz of a million apps distracting me from my work or life, but I let the most important ones buzz me Pixel Watch 3. Everything else can wait until I decide I have time to check my phone. This is part of my digital detox setup and it’s not something I’m willing to sacrifice for the sake of this experiment. If you keep app notifications on, the adaptive setting should work the same way, reducing the buzz in quieter environments and increasing it in busy places.

Not everything has been perfect, though. Over the last two weeks, there have definitely been times when I’ve noticed something is off, and that’s been in the morning or at night when there’s super calm around me and I’m typing or scrolling. Even the slightest tactile feedback creates a sound that disrupts the silence, and since my husband is a late sleeper, it causes him to toss and turn. No more answering Slack messages at 7 a.m. or doomscrolling on Twitter at 2 a.m. or I risk waking him up. I guess this is a good thing for my health, but I’d love to make my own bad choices, so I’ll probably disable haptic feedback altogether.

I can finally say that I have partially made peace with the vibration feature of my phone, thanks to Adaptive vibration. 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.