A constant stream of banners, buzzes and red badges is one of the fastest ways to feel overwhelmed by a phone. The iPhone gives you fine control over all of it, from switching a single chatty app off completely to quieting everything during work or sleep. Here is how to do each, and how to avoid the common surprise of alerts still slipping through.
Turn off notifications for one app
This is the right tool when a specific app will not stop pestering you.
- Open the Settings app.
- Tap Notifications.
- Scroll to the app in the list and tap it.
- Turn off Allow Notifications at the top.
With that switch off, the app stops sending every kind of alert: no sounds, no banners, no badges and nothing on the Lock Screen. You will still see its content when you open the app yourself. Repeat for any other apps you want to silence.
Keep an app but reduce its interruptions
Switching everything off can be too blunt. Often you want to keep an app’s notifications but make them less intrusive. On the same Settings > Notifications > [app] screen, you can fine-tune how alerts appear:
- Alerts: choose whether notifications show on the Lock Screen, in Notification Center, and as Banners. Turn off Lock Screen to stop them appearing when the phone is idle, while still collecting them in Notification Center.
- Sounds: switch off to make the app’s alerts silent.
- Badges: turn off to remove the red number from the app icon.
- Banner Style: set to Temporary so banners slide away on their own instead of staying until you dismiss them.
Mixing these lets you, for example, keep an app’s badge but kill its sound, so you notice new items only when you glance at the Home Screen.
Silence apps on a schedule with Focus
If your real problem is timing, being interrupted during work, dinner or sleep, a Focus is better than permanently disabling apps. A Focus lets you decide which people and apps can reach you and switches on automatically.
- Open Settings and tap Focus.
- Choose a ready-made Focus such as Do Not Disturb, Work or Sleep, or tap the plus sign to create your own.
- Under Silence Notifications From (or Allowed/Silenced), set which apps and people are muted or allowed through.
- Tap Set a Schedule to have the Focus turn on at certain times, at a location, or when you open certain apps.
You can also toggle a Focus on instantly from Control Center by tapping the Focus button and picking one. This is the fastest way to go quiet for an hour without changing any per-app settings.
Watch out for Time Sensitive alerts
Some notifications are marked Time Sensitive, which lets them break through a Focus even when other alerts are silenced. That is useful for things like security codes or delivery updates, but it means a Focus will not necessarily give you total silence. To stop a particular app’s Time Sensitive alerts, open Settings > Notifications, tap the app, and turn off Time Sensitive Notifications. Think before you do this for security-related apps, where a genuinely urgent alert is worth the interruption.
Stop others seeing that you’ve silenced notifications
When a Focus is on, people messaging you may see a note that you have notifications silenced. If you would rather keep that private, open Settings > Focus, tap Focus Status, and turn off Share Focus Status. Your Focus still works; the people messaging you just will not be told it is on.
Turn off Lock Screen and preview clutter
Two more settings reduce noise across the whole phone. In Settings > Notifications, the Show Previews option controls whether the text of a message appears on the Lock Screen; set it to When Unlocked or Never for more privacy. You can also change how notifications are grouped and whether they appear as a count, a stack or a list on the Lock Screen, which cuts visual clutter without muting anything.
Turn off a single conversation or a surprise alert
Sometimes the interruption is narrower than a whole app. In Messages you can mute one noisy group chat without silencing the rest: swipe left on the conversation in the list and tap Hide Alerts (the bell icon). A moon symbol then shows the thread is muted while messages still arrive quietly. There is also a fast way to deal with an alert the moment it appears. When a notification shows on the Lock Screen or in Notification Center, swipe it left and tap Options, and you can mute that app for an hour or for the day, or jump straight to turning it off, without digging through Settings at all.
Stop marketing and promotional pushes
A large share of unwanted notifications are promotions from apps rather than anything you actually need. Under Apple’s rules, apps must ask before sending you marketing pushes, but many bury the request in an onboarding screen you tapped past. The cleanest fix is to open Settings > Notifications, work down the list, and switch off the apps whose alerts are purely promotional, such as games and shopping apps. For apps you want to keep, check inside the app’s own settings too, where there is often a separate switch for marketing or news that you can disable while keeping the alerts that matter.
Batch alerts with Scheduled Summary
If total silence is not what you want, the iPhone can hold back less urgent notifications and deliver them together at times you choose. Open Settings > Notifications > Scheduled Summary and turn it on, then pick the delivery times and the apps to include. Instead of buzzing throughout the day, those apps collect their alerts into a tidy summary that arrives, for example, at 8am and 6pm. Direct messages and anything marked Time Sensitive still come through immediately, so you stay reachable for the things that matter while the steady drip of low-priority alerts is gathered up and handed to you on your own schedule.
Which approach should you use?
If one app is the culprit, switch it off or trim its alerts in Settings > Notifications. If the issue is being interrupted at the wrong moments, set up a Focus so the phone quiets itself on a schedule and lets the important people through. If you would rather defer alerts than block them, a Scheduled Summary gathers them for set times. And if alerts are still getting past a Focus, the usual reason is a Time Sensitive setting you can turn off per app. With those levers, you can make your iPhone as quiet or as responsive as you want.
