6 Ways to Improve Notifications on iPhone
Notifications are both a curse and a blessing. You can be great in many situations, but you probably ignore most of them. There are several things we can do to make notifications work a little better on your iPhone.
Unfortunately, the notification situation on the iPhone is a bit messy. There are many settings and options, but Apple doesn’t explain much of it well. We’ll show you what to tweak to get the best notification experience on your iPhone.
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Customize notifications as they come in
The best way to improve notifications is to tweak them when they come. This is actually very easy on the iPhone. When a notification appears, slowly swipe left on the notification and select the Manage option.
This immediately gives you two options: Deliver Quietly and Turn Off. There’s also a handy shortcut to the full notification settings. This is a great little shortcut for changing notification settings without having to hunt down.
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Hide sensitive content on the lock screen
One way notifications can be annoying is when they share things you don’t want others to see. The lock screen is ripe for these kinds of notifications, so let’s fix that.
The iPhone allows you to hide the content of certain notifications on the lock screen. This means you will still get the notification and it will appear on the lock screen, but the content will be hidden.
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Group (or ungroup) notifications.
Speaking of the lock screen, iPhone notifications from the same app can be grouped together. They appear as a bunch on the lock screen and in the notification center. This is enabled by default but can be tweaked for each app.
Each app has three different options for notification grouping, “Automatic” is enabled by default.
- Automatically: The app’s notifications are intelligently grouped by thread, topic, and other criteria.
- via app: All notifications of the app are summarized.
- Out of: Notifications are not grouped at all.
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Make notifications appear “silent”.
Notifications don’t have to be loud and annoying. You have the option to make them appear “silent”. This can be done directly from the notification, as shown above, or from the settings.
Basically, when a notification is delivered quietly, it just appears on your device without any fanfare. You’ll still see it in the notification center and on the home screen, but not on the lock screen, and it won’t vibrate or make a sound.
Stop notifications from turning on the screen
By default, iPhone notifications are always on-screen. Not only can this be annoying, but it also drains the battery faster if you get a lot of them. Luckily, it can be turned off fairly easily.
Each app has three different types of alerts it can run – lock screen, notification center, and banner. Simply turning off the lock screen option will prevent notifications from appearing on the screen.
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Turn off notifications when you need to focus
One of the most powerful notification features of the iPhone is called “Focus”. It’s essentially a way to create personalized Do Not Disturb modes for specific situations.
For example, you might want to limit distractions while studying. You can create a “study” focus mode that blocks social media notifications and even create a custom home screen layout for those times.
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iPhone notifications can be great and terrible. It’s up to you to customize the experience to your liking. If your iPhone is becoming too much of a distraction and frustration, try these tips.
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