Whether you’re looking to silence unnecessary alerts during meetings, prioritize important messages, or simply declutter your Lock Screen, maintaining a healthy balance between staying informed and avoiding notification overload is essential.
In this article, we’ll go over your iPhone notification settings and provide a comprehensive guide on how to adjust them to best suit your needs.
Access and customize your iPhone notification settings
Open the iOS Settings app and tap Notifications.
You’ll see 10 options here, and here’s what they all do.
Display As
You can pick from Count, Stack, or List styles for your Lock Screen notifications. We’ve explained them all in our dedicated tutorial titled how to change the way notifications are displayed on your iPhone Lock Screen.
Scheduled Summary
This handy feature bundles non-important notifications and shows all. of them at the time(s) of your choosing. You can learn more about it here.
Show Previews
This gives you a preview of your notifications, whether your iPhone is locked or unlocked. Pick from Always, When Unlocked, or Never.
Screen Sharing
You can choose to allow notifications when you’re sharing your iPhone screen using SharePlay or via Screen Mirroring. By default, it’s set to disable notifications during SharePlay or Screen Mirroring, and I think it makes perfect sense.
Prioritize Notifications
Apple Intelligence will put important and urgent texts, missed calls, and other app notifications in a highlighted “Priority Notifications” section. These alerts stay pinned on the Lock Screen so you don’t miss them.
Summarize Notifications
Apple Intelligence will summarize lengthy or multiple pending notifications and display a condensed version. It’s shown in italic style. I don’t find it useful at all, and have disabled it permanently.
Announce Notifications
You can have Siri read out your time-sensitive or direct message notifications and reply to that notification without saying Hey Siri.
Siri Suggestions
Next, you’ll see Siri Suggestions. If you tap this option, you can choose which apps on your device can suggest Shortcuts on the Lock Screen.
App Notification Style
Now that you’ve taken care of the basics for your notifications, it’s time to work on those you receive for apps. Each app can have its own unique notification settings. This is great because you may not want alerts for things like games. And for apps you do want notifications for, you may want them customized a certain way. Select an app from the list and then adjust the following options:
- Allow Notifications: Turn on the toggle to receive notifications for that app.
- Critical Alerts and Time Sensitive Notifications: Some apps can send such notifications. You can allow or block them.
- Alerts: Choose to receive notifications on your Lock Screen, in your Notification Center, or as banners. You can pick any or all of these options.
- Banner Style: If you choose to show alerts as banners above, you’ll see an option for the Banner Style. Temporary banners only display for a short time and then disappear, while Persistent banners remain on the screen until you acknowledge them.
- Sounds and Badges: Turn the toggles on if you want a sound and a badge icon when the app has a notification.
- Show in CarPlay: This option only appears if you use CarPlay and that app supports CarPlay. You can turn it off if you don’t want notifications from this app on your car’s screen while using CarPlay.
- Show on Mac: You can choose whether app notifications from this app are pushed to your Mac and open in the iPhone Mirroring window.
- Show Previews: Decide if you want previews for the specific app and if you want them Always, When Unlocked, or Never.
- Notification Grouping: Decide if you want notifications grouped automatically, by app, or not at all.
- Prioritize Notifications: Allow or block notifications from this app to show in the “Priority Notifications” box on the Lock Screen.
- Customize Notifications: Some apps may show this section with additional notifications for this app.
Even after you make changes to your notifications, you may decide later that you’d like to make more adjustments. And this is easy to do, as you can see. Plus, when you download a new app to your iPhone, remember to pop back into your Notification settings so that you receive the type of alerts you want for that app.
Government Alerts
You can enable or disable notifications for AMBER Alerts, Emergency Alerts, Public Safety Alerts, and Test Alerts. Here’s more on it. Note that this isn’t available or displayed in all countries and regions.
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