How to Manage Your Increasingly Desperate App Notifications

My best friend sent me a message on Facebook Messenger. It wasn’t urgent, so I cleared the notification, making a mental note to respond later. Ten minutes later, Facebook sends another notification. “Reminder: [My friend] sent you a message. It’s tacky, even for Facebook. And it’s not the only app that’s increasingly looking for even the slightest crumb of attention.

Over the past two months, I have personally received dozens of what I can only call despair notifications. Send alerts from apps that don’t really need anything, but would really like me to give them some attention anyway. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The Disney+ app let me know because I watched The SimpsonsI might be interested in watching The Simpsons movie (which I also watched recently).

• Discord informed me that someone on a server I’m also on updated their status, which I guess is a thing you can do in Discord.

• Venmo would like me to know that I can fund my Kalshi account with my Venmo balance. (I do not and will never have a Kalshi account.)

• Reddit started sending push alerts for news from communities I wasn’t subscribed to and had never visited.

• Duet sent half a dozen aggressive notifications within 15 minutes of closing the app, including several alerts saying “She likes you.” Which is a surprisingly exasperated tone for a dating app.

• GrubHub asked me if I wanted to order food, precisely five minutes after I ordered food.

Some of these are obviously just ads disguised as alerts – which is an annoying problem – but just as many appear to be nothing more than a reminder that an app exists. And if you could open the app and increase its engagement numbers, that would be great.

Are app notifications really getting worse?

Wow, I hadn’t thought of that, thanks Disney+.
Credit: Lifehacker

While it’s still difficult to quantify vibration-related annoyances, there is at least some data to support the idea that businesses are increasingly desperate for your attention when it comes to notifications. According to a 2025 analysis According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, news publishers are increasingly relying on push notifications to reach their audiences, to avoid relying too heavily on platforms like Google or social media apps.

However, this attempt to attract direct attention comes at a cost – and in the midst of an arms race with platforms. According to the Reuters report, 79% of respondents don’t receive any news alerts, and 43% of them are because users have actively turned off notifications. Worse yet, iOS and Android have both experienced AI summaries of notifications of questionable reliabilitywhich makes them even more annoying to deal with.

This report only looks at a small segment of the notifications you might see on a given day, but it reveals a broader trend. We increasingly live in an attention economy, where seemingly unrelated industries compete for your eyeballs. This is how we end up with companies like Netflix invests in video gamesor the video game industry competing with gambling sites and porn.

In this context, your notifications become the front line in the battle for your attention. No, it doesn’t take a genius to know that someone who watched The Simpsons might be interested in watching The Simpsons. But if a quick notification can remind me to watch more of the show today, rather than play more of it Pathological 3It’s a win for Disney.

And any victory will be worth it for most businesses right now. Generally speaking, the economy is not doing so well. So if a company can do something to show that engagement in their app has increased by even 5%, they probably will. And sending more notifications is usually one of the cheapest and easiest ways to leverage internal numbers.

How to Reduce App Notification Spam

Credit: Lifehacker

There is at least one positive side to the whole notification arms race problem: there is a plot of tools available to help you control your alerts. Some are built right into your phone’s operating system, but there are also third-party tools you can use to provide some peace of mind. Here are some of the best options available.

Use your phone’s operating system-level settings to manage notifications

Both major smartphone platforms have pretty robust tools for dictating the type of alerts you can receive and how disruptive they are. We have comprehensive guides on tools for manage your Android And iOS notificationsBut even if you don’t want to dig deeper into your phone’s settings, you can gradually eliminate the most annoying alerts as you receive them.

On Android, you can long-press a notification in your shadow to find options to edit or delete alerts. Most notifications can be sorted into Priority, Default, or Silent, which behave differently depending on your default settings. You can also tap the Settings gear icon to dive into the app’s specific notification settings to turn off alert categories. These vary by app, but in many cases you can turn off things like ads or news alerts without turning off messages that actually interest you.

On iOS, you can find similar tools by swiping up a notification and tapping Options. Here you’ll find quick shortcuts to do things like turn off an app’s notifications for a short time or navigate to deeper settings to turn off categories of notifications. In my experience, it’s often easier to change these settings every time I get a particularly annoying alert, rather than checking all of my notification settings at once.

Explore each app’s notification settings

Most apps have their own category of notification settings that can be adjusted individually. In some cases these may overlap with the same settings you’ll find using the method above, but just as often you’ll find many more toggles that don’t. However, some applications are darker than others in terms of ease of finding these settings.

For an instructive 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. This is already pretty buried, but if you log into the app with multiple accounts, you’ll need to follow this process to each account you are logged in to. Otherwise, notifications you’ve disabled for one account may still appear through another.

Most apps aren’t this chaotic, but it can still be annoying to navigate through all the tedious menus. In some cases, however, this may be your only option. On Android, Reddit only has one notification category using the previous method, which means you can only enable all enable or disable notifications at the same time. So if you can’t find the tools you need to selectively turn off certain alerts in the operating system-level settings, it might be worth digging through the app menus.

When all else fails, use third-party tools

It shouldn’t really be necessary to install an app just to get other apps to keep quiet, but if we have to, then we have to. BuzzKill, for Androidis a simple $4 app that gives you more robust tools for filtering, managing, or deleting notifications than any of the built-in notification management settings.

What sets BuzzKill apart is that in addition to filtering notifications based on the app sending them, it can also filter alerts based on things like what words they contain, whether they have an image attached, or whether they’re part of a group chat. So if you want to continue receiving breaking news alerts, but are tired of hearing about them A guy who is always in the news for some reason, you can filter them out selectively.

Unfortunately, this one will likely remain Android-only, as iOS generally keeps apps in smaller sandboxes. BuzzKill needs to be able to read notifications from other apps in order to filter them, and that’s not something iOS generally allows apps to do. So if you’re part of the Apple ecosystem, you’ll have to stick to the built-in tools for now.

More broadly, it also can’t hurt to let app developers know that you’re annoyed by their incessant pings. Companies can try to boost engagement by testing how well they can get your attention before disabling them (or uninstalling the app altogether). But turning off unnecessary alerts can send a signal that they’ve gone too far in the wrong direction. Sending feedback reports, where possible, can potentially send an even stronger signal.