🗂️Keep in Mind How to Fully Customize Your iPhone Notifications

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Smartphone notifications are a constant accompaniment to everyday life—from texts and calls to breaking news and messages from your smart video doorbell—and to avoid non-stop distractions, you need to figure out the best way to configure the notification controls your phone gives you.

We've already covered customizing notifications on Android, and the iPhone also gives you plenty of control over the pings and buzzes you hear. In fact, there are more options for alerts in iOS than you might have realized if you haven't dug deeply into the settings—so you'll find a full rundown below.

While they're not talked about in this particular guide, remember that individual apps—like WhatsApp, Slack, and Instagram—have their own notification settings inside the apps themselves. You can use these to further fine-tune how notifications appear on your phone (Slack, for example, lets you pause alerts during certain times of the day).

The basics of sound and haptics​

To start at the start, if you choose Sounds & Haptics from the main iPhone Settings menu, you can configure sounds and vibrations across the whole of iOS. You can set the ringtone and notification volume from here, and set alert sounds for key events like calls, texts, voicemails, reminders, and emails. If you don't want a specific alert to make a sound, tap the alert and choose None.

If you have a newer iPhone with an Action Button, you'll see a Silent Mode toggle switch at the top—silent mode can also be launched with the Action Button, and via the Ring/Silent slider on older iPhones without an Action Button. With silent mode enabled, none of your incoming notifications will make a sound, though they will trigger vibrations.

Your iPhone comes with a Silent Mode setting. Credit: Lifehacker

If you'd rather not have the vibrations either—and want a completely quiet phone you can ignore until you're ready to look at it—tap Haptics. The next menu lets you choose if vibrations always play alongside notifications, only play in silent mode, only play out of silent mode, or never play.

The settings here don't affect what you see on screen: Visually, the notifications appear as normal, so if you're looking at your iPhone, you'll see them. If you come back to your phone after a break, they'll be waiting for you. However, the sounds and haptics options do give you a quick and easy way of making notifications less distracting across the board.

Setting app notification options​

In addition to everything you can do via the Sounds & Haptics menu in Settings, you can make changes to notifications from individual apps from the Notifications menu, also in Settings. At the top, you can set how you want them to work in general, whether you want them stacked or listed, or summarized with Apple Intelligence, for example.

Scroll down and you get to a full list of all the apps installed on your iPhone. Tap through on an app to customize its notifications, or to turn them off entirely: You can choose whether or not the alerts show up on the lock screen, in the Notification Center, and as banners at the top of the screen, as well as control grouping and preview behavior.

You can configure individual app notifications. Credit: Lifehhacker

On some apps (including Messages and FaceTime) you can choose a specific notification sound to use, and for every app, you can have sounds enabled or disabled (as far as vibrations go, apps will follow the rules from the sounds and haptics settings). You can also set whether banner alerts are temporary or persistent.

These settings control not just the sounds that notifications make, but whether they turn up at all: If you turn off notifications for an app, you won't be disturbed by it, but you'll need to go into that app to be able to see if there's anything new there. You'll need to strike a balance between avoiding distractions and staying informed.

Using Focus modes on the iPhone​

There's another layer to iPhone notifications: focus modes. These modes act like Do Not Disturb with extras, and let you have different settings for notifications at different times of the day. You could silence all social media messaging apps while you're at work, for example, and silence work-related apps while you're at home.

Head to Focus from Settings to see what's available. Even if you've never used the Focus feature before, you'll see several modes already created for you—for when you're driving, when you're sleeping, or when you're working out, for example. You also have the option, via the Share Across Devices toggle switch, to sync Focus modes between Apple devices (including Macs and Apple Watches).

Use Focus modes to fine-tune notifications. Credit: Lifehacker

Tap on any Focus mode to make changes, or create a new one from scratch via the + (plus) button up in the top right corner. You've got plenty of options to explore here: Focus modes can be set to work on a schedule or enabled manually, and you get to choose which apps and contacts can still make your phone buzz and ping while in this mode. You can even have customized home screens and lock screens for each mode.

Note that these modes hide notifications away—they aren't queued up to be delivered later (which is what happens when your phone is in airplane mode). You'll need to head to the Notification Center or individual apps afterward to see if there's anything you've missed while notifications were silenced.
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