How to Deal With the Ever-Increasing Number of App Notifications
My best friend messaged me on Facebook Messenger. It wasn’t urgent, so I swiped away the notification, making a mental note to reply later. Ten minutes later, Facebook sent another notification: “Reminder: [My friend] sent you a message.” It’s intrusive, even for Facebook. And it’s not the only app that’s increasingly desperate for any kind of attention.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve personally received dozens of notifications that I can only describe as desperate . Push notifications from apps that don’t really need anything, but would still be thrilled if I paid attention to them. These include, but are far from limited to, the following:
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The Disney+ app told me that since I’d watched The Simpsons , I might be interested in watching The Simpsons Movie (which I also recently watched).
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Discord told me that someone on a server I’m also a member of updated their status, which I understand is perfectly possible to do on Discord.
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Venmo wants me to know that I can fund my Kalshi account with Venmo funds. (I don’t have and never will have a Kalshi account.)
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Reddit started sending push notifications about news from communities I wasn’t subscribed to or had never visited.
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Within 15 minutes of closing the app, Duet sent half a dozen aggressive notifications, including several messages along the lines of “She just likes you.” This is surprising, given the dating app’s irritated tone.
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Five minutes after I placed my order, GrubHub asked me if I wanted to order it.
Some of them are clearly just ads disguised as notifications—that’s also an annoying problem—but many of them seem to be little more than reminders of the app’s existence. If you could please open the app and increase its engagement, that would be great.
Are app notifications really getting worse?
While quantifying the annoyance caused by vibration is always difficult, there is at least data to support the idea that companies are increasingly seeking to attract your attention through notifications. According to a Reuters Institute for Journalism 2025 analysis , news publishers are increasingly using push notifications to connect with their audiences to avoid over-reliance on platforms like Google or social media apps.
However, this attempt to attract direct attention comes at a cost—and it’s happening in the midst of a platform arms race. According to a Reuters report, 79% of respondents don’t receive any news notifications at all, and in 43% of cases, this is because users actively disable notifications. Worse, iOS and Android have experimented with dubiously reliable AI-powered notification summaries , making them even more annoying.
This report examines only a small portion of the notifications you might see daily, but it’s indicative of a larger trend. We increasingly live in an attention economy, where seemingly unrelated industries compete for your attention. This is why companies like Netflix are investing in video games , and why the video game industry competes with gambling sites and pornography .
In this context, your notifications become the front line in the battle for your attention. No, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that someone who watched The Simpsons might be interested in watching The Simpsons . But if a quick notification can remind me to watch a few more episodes today instead of playing Pathologic 3 , that’s already a win for Disney.
And any victory right now will be significant for most companies. The economy, in general, isn’t doing well . Therefore, if a company can demonstrate that engagement in their app has increased by at least 5%, they’re likely to do so. And sending more notifications is usually one of the cheapest and easiest ways to improve internal metrics.
How to reduce app notification spam
There’s at least one silver lining to this notification arms race: there are plenty of tools available to help you manage your alerts. Some are built right into your phone’s operating system, but there are also third-party tools you can use to ensure peace and quiet. Here are some of the best options available.
To manage notifications, use your phone’s operating system settings.
Both major smartphone platforms offer quite powerful tools for managing notification types and how intrusive they are. We have detailed guides to notification management tools on Android and iOS , but even if you don’t want to delve into your phone’s settings, you can gradually disable the most annoying notifications as they appear.
On Android, by long-pressing a notification in the notification bar, you can find options to customize or disable alerts. Most notifications can be sorted by priority, default, or silent, and their behavior depends on your default settings. You can also tap the “Settings” gear icon to access the app-specific notification settings and disable alert categories. These settings vary by app, but in many cases, you can disable, for example, ads or news alerts without disabling the messages you really care about.
On iOS, similar tools can be found by swiping on a notification and tapping “Options.” Here, you’ll find quick shortcuts for actions like muting an app for a short period of time or accessing more detailed settings to disable notification categories. In my experience, it’s often easier to adjust these settings each time I receive a particularly annoying notification than to go through all my notification settings at once.
Review each app’s notification settings.
Most apps have their own category of notification settings that can be adjusted individually. In some cases, these may partially overlap with the settings you’ll find using the method described above, but it’s also common to find other switches that don’t match. However, some apps are less reliable in accessing these settings.
As a prime example, in the Reddit app, you can go to “Settings” > “Account Settings” > “Manage Notifications” to find a long list of possible alerts you may receive. It’s already fairly hidden, but if you sign into the app with multiple accounts, you’ll need to go through this process for each account you’re logged into. Otherwise, notifications you’ve muted for one account may still appear on another.
Most apps aren’t quite as cluttered, but it can still be annoying to have to dig through all those tedious menus. In some cases, it may be the only option. On Android, Reddit only has one notification category when using the previous method, meaning you can only turn all notifications on or off at once. So, if you can’t find the tools you need to selectively disable specific notifications in the OS settings, it might be worth looking for them in the app menu.
If all other methods fail, use third-party tools.
There really shouldn’t be any need to install an app just to silence other apps, but if you absolutely must, you should. BuzzKill for Android is a simple $4 app that provides more powerful tools for filtering, managing, and suppressing notifications than any built-in notification management settings.
A distinctive feature of BuzzKill is that in addition to filtering notifications by the app that sends them, it can also filter alerts by parameters such as word content, the presence of an image, or whether they’re part of a group chat. So, if you want to continue receiving news alerts but are tired of hearing about a particular person who’s constantly making headlines, you can selectively filter out such messages.
Unfortunately, this feature will likely remain exclusive to Android, as iOS typically imposes stricter restrictions on apps. BuzzKill needs to be able to read notifications from other apps to filter them, and iOS typically doesn’t allow apps to do this. So, if you’re using the Apple ecosystem, you’ll have to make do with the built-in tools for now.
More broadly, it also doesn’t hurt to let app developers know if you’re annoyed by their intrusive notifications. Companies can try to boost user engagement by testing how much they can distract you before you disable notifications (or delete the app entirely). But disabling unnecessary notifications can signal that they’ve gone too far in the wrong direction. Reporting feedback where possible can potentially send an even stronger signal.