How To Turn Off Unwanted Notifications

All of your apps are constantly competing for your attention. Which ones do you really care about?

There are a number of apps that will relentlessly send you notifications just to advertise their promotions. If you don't customize your notification settings, your important messages will be buried in a sea of advertisements.

To reduce clutter, optimize performance, and avoid unwanted dinging from your device, it is good practice to customize your notification settings. You can pick a few that you really care about, and let the rest sit quietly in the corner until you need them.

This is your notification center. You can access it by swiping down from the top of your home screen. It collects all your recent notifications. You can swipe left to clear each one, or tap the X to clear all.

But what if you don't want certain notifications to show up here at all? For that, you'll have to navigate to your settings menu...

Tap settings from the home screen.

If you don't see settings on your home screen, swipe all the way to the right and search for it in your app library.

Once in settings, tap notifications.

Scroll down on the notification settings page.

This is where you control the notification settings for each individual app. Most will default to "Banners, Sounds, Badges"

Banners are the messages from the notification center that go across your screen.

Badges are the red numbered circles that appear next to each app icon.

Tap on any app from the list to change that app's notification settings.

From this screen, you can customize the notification settings for whichever app you tapped on. To turn the notifications on or off for that app, toggle the allow notifications switch at the top of this screen.

This is what the screen will look like when notifications are deactivated for this app.

Turning notifications off for an app won't prevent you from receiving messages in that app. For example, if I would have turned Messenger off, I could still access my Facebook messages when I open the app. It just won't notify me unless I actually open that specific app. So, my advice is to only leave notifications on for apps that you actually have an urgent interest in.

I would be sure to at least leave these two on for your calls and texts, though.

Now that you've adjusted your notification settings, you will see less clutter on your home screen, and the alerts you actually care about will be clearly visible.