Follow These Steps to Set up Android Notifications
If left unchecked, our smartphones can be constantly distracted, buzzing and beeping throughout the day—so much so that it can be difficult to do anything else between reading and responding to messages and scrolling through feeds. Are you participating in an unmanageable number of group chats ? Yes, me too.
There is hope: spending a few minutes setting up notifications on your Android phone can make a big difference in terms of which apps can ping you and under what conditions. Notification management on Android has gradually improved over the years, to the point where you now have a very decent level of granular control.
Android is Android, so there are differences between phones, so you may have to adapt the instructions below a little. They are written for use on Google Pixel phones running Android 14 or later, and Samsung Galaxy phones running Android 14 and OneUI 6.1 or later.
Application notifications
From the Settings menu, select Notifications, then App Notifications , then tap on an app: You’ll see a toggle switch that lets you turn all notifications on or off for an app, so you can quickly mute apps you don’t want to hear. from – You’ll need to open the app to see what’s new.
If you’re using a Pixel phone, you’ll see a list of notification channels (or types): for the Clock app, for example, they include alarms, timers, and stopwatch alerts. Tap any channel to turn a specific notification on or off, or toggle it between “Default” (using your phone’s current alert settings) or “Silent” (the notification will appear on the screen but will not cause noise or vibration, regardless your phone settings).
On Galaxy phones, you’ll have to do a little extra work to see these channels. From the main Notifications screen, select More settings , then turn on Manage notification categories for each app . This gives you access to individual feeds under Notification Categories when you select a specific app.
Each individual app page allows you to control whether its notifications will trigger pop-ups on the screen, as well as dots or icons on the app icon (in the app drawer and on home screens). Sounds and vibration can also be handled separately, and you’ll also see lock screen options: App notifications can appear entirely on the lock screen, or appear without a preview (in case someone else is looking at your phone), or not appear at all.
Return to the main notifications screen to find more options, although they differ slightly on Pixel and Galaxy phones. You can set certain conversations in your messaging apps to have higher priority so they appear at the top of your chat and notification lists, and control whether notifications can appear as floating bubbles on top of other apps. You can also turn notification snoozing on or off and view your notification history (handy if you miss an alert).
To set default sound and vibration settings for notifications, select Sound & Vibration (Pixel) or Sound & Vibration (Galaxy) from the Settings menu. Note that apps can optionally have their own custom notification sound, which you can set by going back to the notification channels we covered earlier, but vibration patterns can’t be customized on an app-by-app basis.
Set up Do Not Disturb mode
You don’t necessarily want the same notification settings to apply all day and all night, and that’s where Do Not Disturb mode comes in. You can access it from Notifications in Settings and you will see that you can either turn it on or off manually or automatically turn it on or off on a schedule. If you don’t make any changes, Do Not Disturb will hide and mute all incoming notifications.
You can configure multiple schedules, for example, one of them applies at night, and another in the morning on weekdays. Each schedule can either have its own custom settings in terms of the notifications you see and don’t see, or follow the default Do Not Disturb configuration.
To install this configuration, you have three main options. The first is “People” (Pixel) or “Calls and Messages” (Galaxy). Here you can specify contacts whose calls and text messages will take priority over Do Not Disturb. There’s also Apps (Pixel) or App Notifications (Galaxy), where you can select specific apps that Do Not Disturb does not apply to.
The third option is “Beeps and other interruptions” (Pixel) or “Beeps and sounds” (Galaxy). Here you can control whether alarms, games, and media apps (like your favorite podcast player ) can interrupt you when Do Not Disturb is on. Once you’ve configured these three Do Not Disturb settings and for each of your schedules, your notifications should be completely tailored to your needs.
Tap Hidden Notification Display Options (Pixel) or Hide Notifications (Galaxy) and you can choose how notifications are hidden when Do Not Disturb is active—you can, for example, hide them completely so you don’t have to know anything , or they appear on the screen but do not make sound or vibrate.
The last option to keep in mind is your phone’s silent settings. On Pixel, press the volume up or down button, then the icon above the slider; On Galaxy, swipe down from the top edge of the screen, then tap the top left icon in Quick Settings. There are three options – turn on sounds and vibration, only vibration, or turn off sound and vibration at the same time – and they will apply to all your apps and notifications.