Your phone has a powerful ability to interrupt you, any time day or night. Notifications are useful when you need them, but constant spam can wear you out and dull your senses to genuinely important information.
Android has long allowed you to organize and handle alerts as they come in. Most apps have their own settings that let you tweak or customize what you get notified about and how often, but 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.
For example, Facebook 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. Here's how to tweak each app's notifications, and manage the flood of alerts you get every day.
Open the App Info Page
From the home screen or app drawer, long-press on the app icon you want to manage. Pressing the Facebook app icon, for instance, 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.
Tap the Notifications Category
Disable the Notifications You Don't Want
If you don't want any notifications from the app in question, the solution is easy: disable the toggle at the top of the screen next to "Show notifications," and all notifications will be blocked from the app.
However, you can get more in-depth in Android Pie. Below the toggle, you'll see any categories the app has defined. Facebook has categories for notifications about tags, comments, friend requests, and more, which lets you disable individual notification categories without turning everything off. To turn off notifications for a category, uncheck the box.
Disable Notifications As They Come
You can also disable notifications as they come in. 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 any time.
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.
Make Your Android Phone Less Annoying
