Tuesday Tip: How to turn off push notifications on your Android cell phone

What are push notifications?

They’re called push notifications. And they certainly are pushy. They’re those constant messages on your phone (ding!) that alert you to a new text, sports score, promo, sale, and everything in between. Some of them you want to see like an email from your boss. Some make you want to throw your phone out the window (do not do this). If you’ve had it up to here with notifications, help is on the way!

You can deal with these distractions several different ways.

Setting up Do Not Disturb mode

Do Not Disturb mode blocks all Android Notifications, turns off push notifications and keeps your phone from making noise at inopportune times. Like when you’re sleeping or in a meeting at work (or sleeping in a meeting at work).

1. Pull down the Quick settings menu from the top of your home screen
2. Tap the Do Not Disturb button.

You can also set Do Not Disturb preferences to let through only important calls and texts. 

1. Tap Settings
2. Sound
3. Do Not Disturb
4. Priority only allows
5. Then choose your options. For instance, you can set “priority only” to include incoming calls and texts from your contacts, repeat callers, reminders and event alerts. You can receive call and text alerts from only your innermost circle by setting Calls and messages to Starred contacts only (you can star people by going to your Contacts list). The Repeat callers setting will let callers through if they call two times within 15 minutes.

Enabling Priority Mode

Choose who or what app you want to receive a push notification from by enabling priority mode. Enable this feature by pulling down the Quick settings menu, tapping Do Not Disturb and turning on Priority only.

There are three Do Not Disturb options in Android:

1. Priority only blocks some calls, texts and app alerts.
2. Alarms only blocks all alerts except your phone’s alarm clock.
3. Total silence stops all alerts.

These are perhaps the most annoying alerts, those notifications that light up your lock screen, usually, it seems, when you least want to be disturbed. You can manage them with varying degrees of rigor—cut them down or shut them down entirely.

To prevent your phone’s lock screen from lighting up whenever a push notification comes in:

1. tap Settings > Display
2. then toggle off Ambient display

Another way to do this is:

1. tap Settings > Sound > Do Not Disturb > Block visual disturbances
2. then enable the Block when screen is off setting.
3. Choosing this option will prevent any alerts blocked by Do Not Disturb from lighting up your lock screen.

Blocking notifications from specific apps

Do you wan to entirely block alerts from specific apps? There are two ways to accomplish this.

Block All or Enable Silence Mode

1. Tap Settings > Notifications.
2. Tap the app you want to silence and enable Block all.
3. Or you can choose to show an app’s alerts in silent mode only.

Long-Press An Alert

Another way to disable notifications from a particular app is to long-press an alert from that app when it appears. You’ll be given the option of blocking all future alerts or showing them silently.

Turning off the blinking notification light

You can also turn off that light that starts blinking (and keeps blinking) whenever you get a notification.

1. Go to Settings > Notifications
2. Tap the Settings button at the top right of the screen
3. then toggle off the Pulse notification light
4. Just below the Pulse notification light toggle is a very handy setting that will block all lock-screen alerts even when Do Not Disturb is not switched on.
5. Tap On the lock screen
6. Then choose Don’t show notifications at all

We hope you find these tips helpful and enjoy your new, quiet phone.