How to turn off notifications in Android
The smartphone is an invention which has changed the world in terms of innovation and technology. It’s also given us the power of tools, the entertainment of games and freedom of music, all in the palm of our hands. The same app developers which bought you amazing games and hours of fun, are however, the same app developers who introduced annoying notifications into their apps.
Now not all apps are like this. But I’m sure you’ve been there when you’re relaxing and all of a sudden your phone makes a noise and you get excited that one of your friends has messaged you. You pick up your device in anticipation of an invitation to hang out when you realize that game you downloaded 3 weeks ago has just told you about a tournament that’s starting.
This tactic is a way of getting players who might have forgotten about the game to go and play it again. It applies to all sorts of app too, not just games. Sometimes they are usual (like when social apps such as WhatsApp tells you that someone had messaged you) and sometimes they are incredibly annoying as app developers exploit this feature.
Luckily you can disable it, and we’re going to explain how.
How to turn off notifications
It’s actually a very easy process. First of all you’ll want to open your “Settings” menu. From there, navigate down to “Notifications” and you’ll be shown a list of all of the apps on your device. From here you can tap on the gear symbol in the corner and you’ll be given options to prevent notifications from showing up on your lock screen, or set sensitive ones to be hidden but to let the more casual ones through.
To delve deeper and to prevent the notifications altogether, from that “Notifications” menu, tap on any of the apps you want to prevent sending you notifications. You’ll then be given the option to “Block All” which will stop you from ever getting a single notification.
There are a couple of other options you can choose, such as not notifying you if your device is on silent or in “Do not disturb” mode.
If you are frantically searching through your “Settings” menu and can’t find the option for notifications there, then you are operating a version of Android which is too low to have this feature included. If this is the case then unfortunately there is very little you can do other than hope and pray that the app developers haven’t stuffed their apps with notifications.
Alternatively…
When you get a notification through, depending on what version of Android you are running, you can swipe down from the top of the screen to view them, and then either long press down on one or do a half swipe on a specific notification. This will show you a gear symbol which will take you to the settings for that particular application, and you can disable them from there.
