Blocking Notifications on Android is much easier with Android Pie
Features of Android Pie
As Android Pie started rolling a few months back in Australia, there are lots of new features to explore in it. One such feature is Blocking Notifications on Android easily. After all, one gets tired of notifications interrupting all the time even at night. Though to many, these are useful sometimes but many times spam and advertisement notifications need to be gotten rid of. These notifications come from various apps and Android has long allowed you to organize and handle alerts as they come in.
Most apps have their own settings that let you customize what you get notified about and how often. Note that before Android 9.0 Pie, there was no central place to adjust these settings. Now, Pie’s new system for managing notifications allows each app to identify different categories of notifications. Like Facebook, the app can distinguish between notifications about birthdays, comments on your posts, or events you have coming up. You can then enable or disable these on a per-category basis.
Steps to set each App notifications
So get geared here as to how to customize or set each app’s notifications, and manage the loads of alerts you get every day.
The first step is to open the App Info page which you can do from the home screen or app drawer by long-press on the app icon you want to manage. Pressing the app icon opens a menu that says “App info” (it may only appear as a symbol with the letter “i” in a circle). Tap this to gain access to the app’s notification settings.
Now tap on the category of the notification as the App info page is where you can force-close an app, manage permissions or data storage, and mess with a bunch of other app settings. So Tap the Notifications category.
Next, disable the notifications you don’t want from the app in question. All you need is to disable the toggle at the top of the screen next to “Show notifications,” and this will blog all notifications from the app. You can get more in-depth in Android Pie. Below the toggle, you’ll see any categories the app has defined and lets you disable individual notification categories without turning everything off. To turn off notifications for a category, uncheck the box.
Also, you can disable notifications as they come like when you get a notification you don’t want, long-press it and tap “Stop notifications.” You can turn these back on in your app’s settings at any time.
Full List of apps
For a full list of apps that are sending you notifications, scroll to the bottom of your notifications and tap Manage notifications, where they can be toggled on and off.
For Do not Disturb, you can schedule Do Not Disturb via Settings > Sounds and vibration > Do not disturb. Here, you can tell your phone to forgo all notifications during a specific time, even phone calls.
Though there will be notifications you’ll want at all hours of the day. Instead of flipping the switch, tap directly on Do not disturb to enter the feature’s settings menu. Here you can set up a recurring schedule for this mode, and you can even allow exceptions. In the Exceptions setting, you can always allow calls and messages from particular contacts from “priority” apps, or even from callers who have repeatedly tried to reach you.
About Android Pie
Android “Pie” is the ninth major release and the 16th version of the Android mobile operating system. It was first released as a developer preview on March 7, 2018, and released publicly on August 6, 2018.
Android 9 Pie was initially available for Google Pixel devices and the Essential Phone. The Sony Xperia XZ3 is the first device with Android Pie pre-installed.
Android Pie utilizes a refresh of Google’s “material design” language, unofficially referred to as “Material Design 2.0”. The revamp provides for more variance in aesthetics; encouraging the creation of custom “themes” for the base guidelines and components rather than a standardized appearance. In addition, Pie contains official support for screen cutouts (“notches”); including APIs and system behaviours depending on their size and position.
User Interface
The most significant user interface change on Pie is a redesigned on-screen navigation bar. Unlike previous versions of Android; it only consists of a slim home button, and a back button rendered only when available. The bar utilizes gesture navigation: swiping up opens the “Overview” screen, a redesign of the existing recent apps menu. Swiping the handle to the right activates application switching. The gesture bar is there on new devices such as the Pixel 3; existing devices may either use the previous navigation key setup or offer the ability to opt into gesture navigation.
The notification area was redesigned, with the clock moved to the left; and the number of icons that may be displayed at once limited to four; in order to accommodate displays that may have “notch” cutouts in the centre. Notifications for chats can now be threaded, displaying previous messages within complementing the existing inline reply functionality. If a particular type of notification is frequently dismissed, the user will now be offered to disable it.
The Pie update is also available for Samsung Galaxy S9, S9+, and Note 8. To recall, the Galaxy S9 and S9+ made the switch to Pie around Christmas time while the Galaxy Note 8, S8 and S8+ did so in mid-February 2019.
