How to Completely Customize IPhone Notifications
Smartphone notifications are a constant part of everyday life—from text messages and calls to the latest news and messages from a smart video doorbell—and to avoid constant distractions, you need to find a better way to customize the notification controls your phone gives you. .
We’ve already covered setting up notifications on Android , and the iPhone also gives you full control over the beeps you hear. In fact, there are more options for notifications in iOS than you might realize unless you’ve dug deep into the settings, so you’ll find a full breakdown below.
While this particular guide doesn’t cover them, remember that individual apps like WhatsApp, Slack, and Instagram have their own notification settings within the apps themselves. You can use them to further fine-tune how notifications appear on your phone (for example, Slack allows you to pause notifications at certain times of the day).
Basics of Sound and Touch
Let’s start at the beginning: If you select Sounds and Haptics from the main iPhone Settings menu, you can customize sounds and vibrations for all of iOS. Here you can set the ringtone and notification volume, and set alert sounds for key events such as calls, text messages, voice messages, reminders, and emails. If you don’t want a specific alert to make a sound, tap the alert and select No .
If you have a new iPhone with an Action button, you’ll see a Silent mode toggle at the top—Silent mode can also be activated using the Action button , or the Ring/Silent slider on older iPhones without an Action button. When silent mode is turned on, none of the incoming notifications will make a sound, although they will vibrate.
If you also prefer no vibration—and want a completely silent phone that you can ignore until you’re ready to look at it—click Haptics . In the next menu, you can choose whether the vibration will always play with notifications, only play in silent mode, only play in silent mode, or never play.
The settings here don’t affect what you see on the screen: visually, notifications appear as normal, so if you look at your iPhone, you’ll see them. If you return to the phone after a break, they will be waiting for you. However, the sound and haptics options give you a quick and easy way to make notifications less distracting across the board.
Set app notification settings
In addition to everything you can do through the Sounds & Haptics menu in Settings, you can make changes to notifications from individual apps from the Notifications menu, as well as in Settings. At the top, you can specify how you want them to work as a whole: whether you want them stacked, listed, or summarized, for example using Apple Intelligence.
Scroll down and you’ll see a complete list of all the apps installed on your iPhone. Tap an app to customize its notifications or turn them off completely. You can choose whether alerts appear on the lock screen, in Notification Center, and as banners at the top of the screen, and as banners at the top of the screen. control grouping and preview behavior.
In some apps (including Messages and FaceTime), you can choose a specific notification sound, and for each app, you can turn sounds on or off (for vibration, apps will follow the rules from the Sounds and Haptics settings). . You can also specify whether the banner alerts are temporary or permanent.
These settings control not only the sounds notifications make, but whether they appear at all: if you turn off notifications for an app, they won’t bother you, but you’ll need to go into that app to be able to see if there’s anything there something new. You will need to find a balance between not being distracted and staying on top of things.
Using Focus Modes on iPhone
There’s another layer to iPhone notifications: focus modes. These modes act like Do Not Disturb mode with additional features and allow you to have different notification settings at different times of the day. For example, you can mute all social media messaging apps while you’re at work and mute work-related apps while you’re at home.
Go to Focus in Settings to see what’s available. Even if you’ve never used Focus before, you’ll see several modes already created for you—for example, when you’re driving, when you’re sleeping, or when you’re working out. You also have the ability to use the Share Across Devices toggle to sync focus modes between Apple devices (including Mac and Apple Watch).
Tap any focus mode to make changes, or create a new one from scratch using the + (plus) button at the top right. There are plenty of options to explore here: Focus modes can be set to run on a schedule or turned on manually, and you can choose which apps and contacts can still make your phone buzz and ping in this mode. You can even customize your home screen and lock screen for each mode.
Note that these modes hide notifications—they don’t queue them for later delivery (which happens when your phone is in airplane mode). After that, you’ll need to go to Notification Center or individual apps to see if you missed anything while notifications were muted.