How to control notifications on iOS

I don't think I'm the only one who says notifications are a pain. There are simply too many of them and the useful ones are often drowned out by spam. Whether promotional notifications should be allowed on our phones is an open question (I have my own feelings on this!). Meanwhile, is It's possible to coexist peacefully with your phone—it just takes a little work.

iPhone owners have more ways to combat the notification fire than ever before, but it's not necessarily an easy system to navigate. Here's a quick primer on how iOS handles notifications and your options for taking control of them.

There are two places where your notifications can live in iOS: in recent notifications or in Notification Center. Recent notifications are what you see when you wake up your phone's screen; If you swipe up from the center of the lock screen, the Notification Center appears, containing all your previous notifications.

There are a couple of ways to access the notification settings for any given app. From the lock screen or Notification Center, you can swipe left on a notification (but not all the path to the left, that will rule it out) and tap Options. This will bring up some quick actions, including the option to mute notifications from that app for an hour or all day. Those are useful ways to silence an app that pings you frequently without having to remember to turn its notifications back on later.

You will also see an option to View settings. Tapping this will take you to that app's notification options in the system menu. This is a useful shortcut, but another way to access any app's notification settings is by going to Settings > Notifications and touching the application you want.

Regardless of how you get there, you'll see an option to completely turn off notifications for that app; is always an option if you want to completely close an app. Except for that, you have many other options at the iOS system level.

Some apps will show an option labeled Urgent notifications, which specifies that all notifications labeled urgent (think: your order has been delivered) will always appear on the lock screen, regardless of any other customization options. Keeping this setting checked gives you some freedom to crack down on notifications from that app more aggressively.

Below that option, you'll see a section labeled Alerts with three types of notification: Lock screen, Notification Centerand banners. By default, all three are checked, meaning that when an alert arrives from that app, it will appear as a banner on your screen, in your recent notifications on the Lock screen, and in your history in Notification Center. If you want, you can uncheck any of these to mute them.

One way to control how often your phone pings you is to send certain alerts directly to Notification Center. You'll still see them, just whenever you want. To do this, uncheck the Banners and Lock Screen options, leaving Notification Center as the only option selected. As long as you leave urgent notifications on, this will silently send low-priority notifications to Notification Center while delivering important ones immediately.

A simpler but less precise approach is to allow a Scheduled summary. Gonna Settings > Notifications to set up a scheduled digest, which is basically a daily digest of low priority notifications. Tap this option to turn on Scheduled Digest and it will guide you through a setup flow where you can choose which apps to include, how many daily digests you want, and when they should arrive. Urgent notifications and direct messages will not be included in the summary; you will still receive them as they arrive.

All of the above tools work at the system level: they are general options on as Your notifications are displayed. For more granular control over which notifications that an app can send you, you'll need to go to the settings within that specific app.

Certain apps (Threads, for example) will offer a shortcut to the app's notification settings so you can access them from the lock screen: simply swipe left on a notification and tap Options. In this case, it is labeled Configure in threads. Tap this option to open the app and delve into your notification settings. Going through each of your apps this way can be tedious, but you can remove a lot of junk this way.