Every day we receive dozens of notifications on our Android smartphone. There are so many that being without looking at them for a while can make them accumulate and make them more difficult to manage in order of importance. Luckily, Google thought about this a long time ago, allowing us to order the importance of applications , so that it is easier for us not to miss those essential notifications.
On many occasions and when notifications are many and from different sources, we tend to delete them all due to the simple frustration of not having them controlled by importance, and having to enter one by one to see what has happened. However, in our string of installed apps, there are some that become more important, such as the email client or WhatsApp, before the notice of a game or offer update. However, the good thing is that each user can prioritize according to their needs.
How to prioritize notifications
Although it was once a function in the testing phase, changing the importance of Android applications is widely present in this operating system, from Android 8 Oreo. The importance of a notification is used by the operating system to determine the extent to which it can interrupt the user (visually and audibly). The greater the importance of the notification, the greater this interruption.
Make a selection
We can easily change the importance of a notification channel in the System Settings menu and entering Applications. Once inside we will have to click on those applications that we consider most important and on which we want to prioritize notifications. The smaller the selection the more effect it will have, since if we mark many as important, the meaning of the function can be largely lost, since if they are all important, none will stand out over the other.
Importance modes
Within each application we will see a section called ” Importance “. This is where each user will change the importance of a notification channel in the system configuration. The options to select are:
- Urgent : Makes a sound and appears as a popup notification.
- High : Makes a sound.
- Medium : There is no sound.
- Low : No sound is emitted and does not appear in the status bar.
Do not interrupt mode
It was starting with Android 5.0, that Goolge introduced the Do not interrupt option. It’s another method of managing notifications, as it mutes the sounds and vibrations of all notifications. These notifications will continue to appear in the system UI as normal, unless we manually block them.
The do not disturb mode can be activated from the Settings menu by going to the sound and notifications menu . In this case, there are three levels of do not interrupt or do not disturb mode:
- Total Silence – Blocks all sounds and vibrations, including alarms, music, videos, and games.
- Alarms Only – Blocks all sounds and vibrations except alarms
- Priority only: Select which categories of the entire system can interrupt (such as alarms, reminders, events, calls or messages only). For messages and calls, you can also choose to filter based on who is the recipient or sender.
