App Notifications Whack-a-mole!! It’s a game that has to be played for a quiet life…

You'll be familiar with 'Whack-a-mole', a fairground game where you have to bash moles that 'pop up' with a mallet. As the game progresses, more and more moles appear, adding difficulty. All of which is brought to mind by app notifications on the modern smartphone.

It's a real issue. Especially when starting out with a new phone (as opposed to cloning your old one, Apple-style, which often restores your settings, helpfully), every single application you install has its own ideas of what it wants to 'push' at you multiple times of day. Install 50 apps (a common average) and you are almost literally drowning in notifications, banners, toasts, and so on.

The average phone user tends to roll with all this and simply accept the deluge of notifications as a fact of life, watching "Scar213 has liked your reply" or "eBay thinks you'll like this new plastic widget, 5% off" or "Bargain Promotions has emailed you with an ultra-exclusive offer you won't want to miss". And so on.

I, however, find it all incredibly frustrating. To have my day interrupted, heck to have my nice clean phone UI interrupted by all this. There are some things I want to be notified about (and, granted, these may change slightly from person to person): a text or WhatsApp message from a close family member or friend, an alert from my bank, and... that's about it. That's ALL I want to see pop up on my phone's lock screen. I don't mind discreet app 'badges', little numbers that indicate that something new is waiting inside an app on my homescreen, but actual notifications are almost always a 'no' from me!

The problem is that setting every app up, in one go, to not send notifications is a big job. You're installing 50 (say) apps at once on a new phone and you really don't want to be diving into each one's Settings, each of which will look different, on day one. In addition, some modern apps, I have observed, don't even have a setting to turn off their notifications - for these, you have to block them at the OS level, physically restricting their access to this system.

So, here's what I do when setting up a phone from scratch. Every time I get a notification, I ask myself "Do I really need to see that?" and if, as is usual, the answer is 'No', then I tap on the notification this one time, into the relevant app and head straight for its Settings menu (usually under a account profile or '...' or hamburger menu) and turn off all notifications. 

And if this isn't easily discoverable (or present) then I head to the phone's master Settings app/hierarchy, into 'Notifications' and then drill down to that specific app and turn 'Off' notifications at this level. So, no matter how much the app tries to throw at your phone's interface while you're doing other things, iOS or Android, i.e. the operating system blocks the lot. Phew.

In practice, this means that for the first few days with your new phone, you'll be playing whack-a-mole with notifications in this way. But with the difference here that, once whacked in the app or in the OS Settings, that particular mole won't bother you again.

Two weeks into ownership, your lockscreen will be delightfully curated and notification spam free!