What’s a push notification?
It’s an alert from apps that give you some kind of new information. They were intended to tell you about something important, that you may not see otherwise, for example, a new email or a friend request on Facebook.
However, no one wants to see all push notifications your iPhone or iPad can offer. They appear automatically, sometimes on top of other apps or at inconvenient times. Some of them exist solely to sell you something or deliver some useless information. Keep reading to learn how to get rid of them.
What are they like?
Basically, there are 3 types of push notifications that you can encounter. Some are more intrusive than others, though Apple allows you to choose which ones you want if any. The 3 main types are:
- Badge icons, the least intrusive type, however, for some these alerts are the most annoying. You can see them as a number in a red circle on the top right corner of the app icon. The number of course shows how many new notifications you’ve received in the app.
- Banners. This type of notification is a rectangle you can see at the top of the screen. They stay there for a few seconds and then go away automatically. Or you can dismiss them by swiping upwards.
- Alerts, the most obvious out of the three types as they show up in the middle of your screen interrupting whatever you are doing at the moment.
One more kind of notification is basically a sound. For example, an alarm or a timer. Sounds are usually coupled with Alerts, but not all the time.
How to block push notifications
To Settings => Notifications (you’ll find it on the left side of the screen). Then scroll down to see the list of your apps.
Choose the app (or apps) you don’t want to receive notifications from, and tap it.
Here you’ll need the information about the types of notifications we’ve just discussed. Select the type you need or choose None to switch them off.
You’ll have to disable notifications on one app at a time, because you can’t do it for all the apps at once.
Notifications in iOS 12
In this version, Apple added new functions that allow you to make quick adjustments to notifications straight from the lock screen or the Notification Center, which you can reach by swiping down from the top of your screen. Now, whenever you see an unwanted notification you can swipe left on that notification and tap Manage to alter its behavior. In this case, you have 2 options.
- Deliver Quietly. This means that notifications won’t interrupt you with sounds, banners, etc. They just go right to your Notification Center where you can look at them when it’s necessary.
- Turn Off. Choosing the second option will block all notifications from this app.
Need more options?
If you’re ready to go further with the customization of the push notifications you get, scroll down further and search for options like Show Previews. Tap on it and choose whether you want to be notified Always, When Unlocked, or Never. The default setting will be When Unlocked, which is especially useful when it comes to home screen notifications on devices with Face ID. When this feature is enabled, you can see the first lines of notifications whenever you look at your phone. However, when others look at your phone, they won’t see anything.
The final option in this section is Notification Grouping. This feature was shown first in iOS 12. It enables you to choose the way how you want the notifications to be grouped on your home screen or in the Notification Center. The first option is to group them automatically, (in this case, your device decides how they are going to be grouped), by an app, or cancel grouping notifications completely to see all push notifications as individual alerts.
Each time you get a new app and launch it, you will probably get a pop-up asking you whether you’d like to get push notifications. Remember that you have control over your notifications, so think about it before making the decision. It’s not a good idea to get a push notification every 5 seconds, but turning them off completely is no better, because there may be something important that you don’t want to miss.