How to adjust your iPhone Notification settings

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 will go over your iPhone notification settings and provide a comprehensive guide on how to adjust them to best suit your needs.

iPhone Notification Center

Access and customize your iPhone notification settings

  1. Open the Settings app.
  2. Tap Notifications, and you will see several options.
Notifications settings on iPhone

Display As

You can pick from Count, Stack, or List styles for your Lock Screen notifications. We explain 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 them all at the time of your choosing. You can learn more all about it.

Show Previews

This gives you a preview of your notification 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.

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.

Government Alerts

Before we look at the notification options for your apps, scroll all the way to the bottom. There you can enable or disable notifications for AMBER Alerts, Emergency Alerts, Public Safety Alerts, and Test Alerts.

Note: This isn’t available or displayed in all countries and regions.

Government alerts in iPhone notifications settings

App notifications

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.

App notification in iPhone settings

Select an app from the list and then adjust the following options:

Allow Notifications: Turn on the toggle to receive notifications for that app.

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 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.

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.

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