Can you silence notifications for one app?

App notifications are alerts that pop up on your device to notify you about updates or activities within an app. They can be useful for staying informed about messages, events, news, and more. However, some app notifications can be overly intrusive or distracting, especially if you receive a lot of them.

You may want to silence notifications from a particular app if you find them disruptive, irrelevant, too frequent, or simply want to focus without constant interruptions. For example, you might silence notifications from social media apps when trying to be productive, or mute a shopping app to avoid temptation to spend money. Thankfully, most mobile devices give you options to mute or adjust notifications on a per-app basis.

Checking Notification Settings

You can check the notification settings for a specific app by:

Open the Settings app on your device^[1]
Tap Apps & Notifications (Android) or Notifications (iPhone)
Scroll down to find the app and tap on it to view its notification settings

Here you can toggle different notification options on or off for that particular app

For example, you may see toggles to enable/disable categories like Sounds, Lockscreen, Banners, Badges, etc. You can customize alert styles, mute notifications temporarily or permanently, and more.

Muting Notifications

One way you can silence notifications for specific apps on an iPhone is to mute them. When you mute notifications, you will still receive notifications for that app, but they will not make any sounds or display badge alerts.

To mute app notifications on an iPhone, go to Settings > Notifications. Tap the app you want to mute and then toggle off Sounds and Badges at the top of the screen. This will prevent that app from making any sound or displaying badge notifications. The name of the app will turn gray to indicate notifications are muted.

You can still view any notifications from the app by checking the Notification Center or Lock screen. But they will no longer make sounds or show badges to get your attention. This is useful for muting an app during certain times or events without fully disabling its notifications.

To unmute the notifications again, simply return to that app’s notification settings and toggle Sounds and Badges back on. You can easily mute and unmute app notifications this way whenever you need to silence them temporarily.

Temporary Muting

You can temporarily mute notifications from a single app using a feature called “Do Not Disturb While App is in Use.” This allows you to silence notifications just while you have that app open. According to Apple support, when enabled, “Do Not Disturb While App is in Use mutes sounds and notifications from apps you choose while you use them.”

On an iPhone, you can enable this feature by going to Settings > Focus > Do Not Disturb. Tap the “+” icon and select “App” to choose which apps will be muted. Android also has a similar “Do Not Disturb permission” setting in the app info screen for each app.

This is useful if you want to avoid distractions from a particular app, but still receive notifications from other apps. For example, you could mute Slack notifications while writing in Google Docs. Once you switch out of the app, notifications will resume normally.

Third-Party Apps

As this article mentions, Android offers several useful third-party apps to control notifications, including FocusMe, NotifyBuddy, FilterBox, and others. These apps provide more advanced and granular options than the basic Android settings.

Apps like FocusMe allow very specific muting rules. For example, you can mute notifications from a single app for a set period of time, like muting Slack notifications during a 90 minute meeting. FocusMe also allows location-based muting, so notifications are automatically muted when you arrive at certain places that you define.

Other notification manager apps like FilterBox use AI to automatically filter less important notifications. FilterBox analyzes notifications and allows you to fine-tune rules over time. This means you can silence lower priority notifications while still receiving more urgent ones.

The key benefit of third-party notification apps is the ability to precisely control notifications from individual apps as needed, rather than just fully enabling or muting everything.

Android Instructions

There are several ways to mute notifications from one app on your Android device. Here are steps for the most popular methods:

To mute notifications from the app’s settings:

Open the app whose notifications you want to mute
Tap the three dots or menu icon to open the app info or settings screen
Select Notifications

Toggle off “Allow notifications” or “Show notifications”

As noted in a Google Support article, some apps have additional notification settings or permissions you can customize.

Alternatively, you can mute specific apps from your device’s notification settings:

Open the Settings app
Choose Notifications
Select the app whose notifications you want to silence

Turn off the notifications

This controls which notifications will show in your status bar without having to access the app’s individual settings. Some versions of Android also have a Temporary Muting option that will silence notifications for 1, 2, 4, or 8 hours.

Customizing Alert Styles

You can customize how notifications appear on your iPhone and lock screen in the Settings app. According to Apple developer documentation, iOS allows customizing aspects like the notification style, visibility on the lock screen, sound, vibration, and notification grouping.

To change the notification style and visibility on your iPhone lock screen, go to Settings > Notifications and select the app. From here you can choose options like:

Notification style: Banner or Alert
Show on Lock Screen: Toggle on or off

Sound: Select a sound or None
Vibration: Toggle vibration on or off

This allows granular control over each app’s notifications. You can hide sensitive notifications from the lock screen, change to a subtle banner alert, or disable vibration and sounds as desired.

Troubleshooting

If muting notifications for a specific app isn’t working, there are a few steps you can try to troubleshoot the issue:

First, open the Settings app and go to Notifications. Scroll down to the app you were trying to mute and make sure the toggle is switched off next to “Allow Notifications”. If it is on, tap the toggle to turn notifications off for that app.

You can also try going into that app’s individual notification settings. Open Settings > Notifications > Select the App > Toggle off Allow Notifications. This will mute notifications directly from that app’s custom notification settings.

Additionally, check that Do Not Disturb is not enabled. Open Settings > Do Not Disturb and make sure Do Not Disturb is switched off. Do Not Disturb will mute notifications for all apps, which could conflict with muting notifications for only one app.

If you’re still having issues with app notifications after trying these troubleshooting steps, you can try restarting your iPhone. Press and hold the side or volume button and the sleep/wake button until the power off slider appears. Slide to turn your iPhone completely off. Then press and hold the sleep/wake button to turn your phone back on.

As a last resort, you may want to delete and reinstall the app causing issues with notifications. This will reset the app’s settings and data on your iPhone. Just make sure your app data is backed up before deleting.

Automation

You can create automations on your iPhone that temporarily mute notifications for specific apps in various contexts. The Shortcuts app lets you build custom workflows that can automatically enable or disable Do Not Disturb mode based on triggers like time, location, or when you open certain apps.

For example, you could create a Do Not Disturb shortcut that turns on when you arrive at work and turns off when you leave. This article provides instructions for setting up a location-based Do Not Disturb automation using Shortcuts on iPhone.

The main steps include:

Create a new automation in Shortcuts
Add a location-based trigger
Configure a “Turn On Do Not Disturb” action

Save the automation

You can create similar automations to temporarily mute notifications from specific apps as you open or close them. This allows muting on a per-app basis for scenarios where you want to minimize distractions.

Summary

In summary, there are many benefits to selectively muting notifications from specific apps rather than turning off all notifications completely. Muting notifications from distracting apps can help you stay focused and improve productivity (Source). Allowing notifications from important apps ensures you don’t miss urgent communications like messages or work updates (Source). Customizing your notification settings gives you more control over when and how you receive alerts (Source). Overall, selectively muting notifications provides a balanced approach that minimizes disruptions while still keeping you connected.