I’ll be the first to admit that I think push notifications are both a gift and a curse. It can be convenient to have real-time notifications when someone’s trying to get in touch with you, but it can also be annoying having a device that integrates your personal entertainment with seemingly endless streams of notifications that hijack your focus away from what matters most to you.
If you can relate, then we think you’re going to love a newly released and free jailbreak tweak called NotiBlock by iOS developer ShemeshApps.
Albeit true that Apple’s own Do Not Disturb mode can curb many of your incoming notifications to keep you focused on the task at hand, it’s not a perfect solution. It can’t be scheduled for certain days, it doesn’t have any notification discrimination options, and it lacks per-app settings. These are all things that NotiBlock takes into consideration, and again, where the jailbreak community comes in to solve a problem that Apple won’t.
So what can you do with NotiBlock? We’ll break it down for you below:
- You can block notifications that contain certain keywords
- You can block notifications based on the app they come from
- You can block notifications during certain scheduled days and times on those days
- You can block notifications entirely, or simply mute them as Apple’s Do Not Disturb mode does
- You can whitelist certain apps and notifications that you want to allow
- And much more…
Once installed, you can create and configure your notification-blocking criteria in the dedicated preference pane that gets added to the Settings app after installation:
Here, you can:
- Toggle NotiBlock on or off in its entirety
- Configure your notification filter list:
- Add, remove, or modify existing notification filters
- Respring to save any changes you make
When you go to create a new or modify an existing notification filter, you can set up the following:
- A name for the notification filter
- Configure notification filter settings:
- If any field in the notification starts with, ends with, contains the text, is the exact text, matches regex, always
- If the title field of the notification starts with, ends with, contains the text, is the exact text, matches regex, always
- If the subtitle field of the notification starts with, ends with, contains the text, is the exact text, matches regex, always
- If the message field of the notification starts with, ends with, contains the text, is the exact text, matches regex, always
- Enter the text in question that want to filter by
- Choose apps that you want to filter notifications from
- Configure a whitelist mode that reverses the effects imposed above (allows notifications that fit the aforementioned criteria instead of blocking them)
- Show blocked notifications in Notification Center (hide them instead of blocking them)
- Configure notification scheduled blocking:
- Choose a start time
- Choose an end time
- Choose the days of the week that notifications will be blocked
At first glance, NotiBlock seems to solve all the problems with iOS notifications that Apple leaves us all to contend with, and that’s one reason why we’d strongly recommend this tweak if you find notifications to be someone intrusive in certain scenarios.
The tweak is available for free in the BigBoss repository for those interested in checking it out, and supports jailbroken iOS 11, 12, and 13 devices. Moreover, the developer has also open-sourced the tweak on their GitHub page for those interested in learning more about how it works.
Do you plan to take control of your handset’s push notifications with NotiBlock? Let us know why or why not in the comments section below.