It’s difficult to escape the incessant demands of your phone to stay focused on your work or activities. An old and little-known option for Android phones could greatly help you.
The smartphone has become a computing device that we use a lot on a daily basis, sometimes more than our computer. As practical and useful as it is, it can nevertheless become intrusive and capture too much of our attention. One cause among others is undoubtedly the numerous notifications displayed by our phone throughout the day and which are not always very relevant.
On Android, it is of course possible to completely mute notifications for all or certain applications, but this is a radical solution which is not the most practical, as certain alerts may be useful or necessary. However, there is a little-known option that has been available on Android since version 8.0, at least seven years ago, to control application notifications much more finely.
Notification channels, sometimes called notification categories depending on the phone, are a system for more precisely choosing what types of notifications appear for each app. Rather than allowing or completely blocking notifications from an application, it is possible to only activate alerts for events that really interest you, and deactivate those for advertisements, recommendations or non-essential information. This way, you can greatly reduce the amount of distractions and unnecessary information appearing on your phone, while still keeping an eye on the events and activities in your apps that really matter.
For example, on the YouTube application, which tends to display a lot of suggestions for new content related to your interests, you can deactivate notification categories such as “Recommendations”, “Product news” or even “Comments and replies”, or even only activate the “Subscriptions” category. This way, you will still receive notifications related to the channels you follow, such as the publication of new videos, but no longer recommendations or suggestions for similar content. A particularly practical function for reducing demands on your phone, which helps you stay focused during your working day or better control the time spent on social networks.
The path to access notification channels or categories differs slightly depending on the brand of your phone, with each manufacturer bringing its own twist to Android, but it remains the same overall. Open the app Settingsthen the section titled Notifications. Then look for a section named Applications Or App notifications and open it, you should then be presented with a list of all the applications installed on your phone. Touch the one that interests you, go down its settings page to a section called Notification channels Or Notification categoryand then tap the name of the channel or category you want to edit to choose whether to enable or disable the corresponding notification type.