Grouped Notifications

Understanding Grouped Notifications

As you know by now, notifications give you the option to receive timely information and reminders from apps installed on your device. These alerts appear on your Lock screen when you wake up your iPhone or iPad, as banners across the top of your screen as you're using your device, or in Notification Center where you can check on them at any time by swiping down from the top of your display. With iOS 12, the way notifications are organized has changed. While you still access them in the same places as before. they no longer appear in a chronological list of individual alerts. Instead, your notifications are now stacked together based on app or behavior. Responding to Grouped Notifications

When you see a stack of notifications from an app or grouping, you can expand the stack to see all the individual alerts within simply by tapping on it. This is a convenient way to browse through all your breaking news alerts or podcast episode releases, all in one consolidated place. From this list view, you can hard press a notification to bring up the option to respond, exit, or visit the notifying app. To dismiss a notification, swipe left and tap Clear. If you'd like to clear a whole stack of notifications, just tap the X at the top right of the stack and tap Clear All. To minimize a list of notifications, tap Show Less. Have Your Alerts Delivered Quietly

Another new addition with iOS 12 is the ability to tailor your notifications without having to go into the Settings app. If you're getting too many alerts from an app, you can swipe left on a stack, tap Manage, and tap Deliver Quietly. This option will keep the app in your Notification Center but will turn off all other notification types, including sounds, banners, badges, and Lock screen alerts. This is a nice option if you don't urgently need alerts from a specific app, but you do want to be able to reference them in Notification Center at your own convenience. Managing Notification Settings

In some situations, you want more granular control over your notifications. Grouped notifications make this easy to do! When you swipe left on a notification and tap Manage, you'll see the option to go to the Settings app for your full list of notification options. On this page, you'll see all the usual options as well as a new one that lets you choose whether your notifications are grouped automatically, by app, or not at all. We recommend choosing automatically (which it's set to by default). That way, your phone will intelligently choose which notifications should be grouped together using its algorithm. Control Your Privacy

When tailoring your settings, privacy is an important concern to consider. For example, when someone texts you, do you want the first two lines of the message to appear on your Lock screen or would you prefer only the sender's name to be visible to bystanders? You can make this choice on a case-by-case basis by swiping left on a notification, tapping Manage, and then scrolling down and tapping Show Preview for a list of options. To maximize your privacy, choose to never show previews. That way, you can see that you have a notification, but you'll only see its contents when you tap on it to visit the notifying app.