How to Manage Your Increasingly Desperate App Notifications

My best friend messaged me on Facebook Messenger. It wasn’t urgent, so I swiped the notification away, making a mental note to reply later. Ten minutes later, Facebook sends another notification. “Reminder: [My friend] sent you a message.” This is clingy, even for Facebook. And it’s not the only app increasingly desperate for any crumb of attention.

In just the last couple months, I’ve personally gotten dozens of what I can only call desperation notifications. Push alerts from apps that don’t really need anything, but would really like it if I gave them some attention anyway. These include, but are not nearly limited to, the following:

• The Disney+ app let me know that because I watched The Simpsons, I might be interested in watching The Simpsons Movie (which I also recently watched).

• Discord informed me that someone in a server I’m also in updated their status, which is, I guess, a thing you can do in Discord.

• Venmo would like me to know I can fund my Kalshi account with my Venmo balance. (I do not and will never have a Kalshi account.)

• Reddit began sending push alerts for news stories from communities I wasn’t subscribed to and had never visited.

• Duet sent an aggressive half-dozen notifications within 15 minutes of closing the app, including multiple alerts that read “She just likes you.” Which is a surprisingly exasperated tone for a dating app.

• GrubHub asked me if I wanted to order food, precisely five minutes after I ordered food.

Some of these are obviously just advertisements disguised as alerts—its own annoying problem—but just as many seem to be little more than a reminder that an app exists. And if you could please open the app and boost its engagement numbers, that would be great.

Are app notifications really getting worse?

While it’s always hard to quantify vibes-based annoyances, there’s at least some data to back up the idea that companies are getting increasingly desperate for your notification attention. According to a 2025 analysis from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, news publishers have increasingly relied on push notifications to reach their audiences, as a way to avoid relying too much on platforms like Google or social media apps.

However, this bid for direct attention comes at a cost—and in the midst of an arms race with platforms. According to the Reuters report, 79% of respondents don’t get any news alerts at all, and 43% of those are because users actively disabled the notifications. Worse yet, iOS and Android have both experimented with questionably reliable AI summaries of notifications, making them even more annoying to deal with.

This report only examines one small segment of the notifications you might sift through on any given day, but it’s instructive of a broader trend. We increasingly live in an attention economy, where seemingly unrelated industries are in competition for your eyeballs. Which is how you end up with companies like Netflix investing in video games, or the video game industry competing with gambling sites and porn.

In that context, your notifications become the frontline in the battle for your attention. No, it doesn’t take a genius to know that someone who watched The Simpsons might be interested in watching The Simpsons. But if a quick notification can remind me to watch more of the show today, rather than play more Pathologic 3, that’s a win for Disney.

And any win is going to be worth it to most companies right now. Broadly speaking, the economy isn’t doing so hot. So, if a company can do something to show that engagement in their app went up by even 5%, they likely will. And sending more notifications is generally one of the cheaper and easier ways to juice internal numbers.

How to decrease app notification spam

Credit: Lifehacker

There’s at least one silver lining to the whole notification arms race problem: There are a lot of tools available to help get your alerts under control. Some are baked right into your phone’s OS, but there are also third-party tools you can use to enforce some peace and quiet. Here are some of the best options available.

Use your phone’s OS-level settings to manage notifications

Both major smartphone platforms have pretty robust tools to dictate what kind of alerts you can receive, and how disruptive they can be. We have full guides on tools for managing your Android and iOS notifications, but even if you don’t want to dive too deep into your phone’s settings, you can slowly whittle away the most annoying alerts as you receive them.

On Android, you can long-press a notification in your shade to find options to tweak or suppress the alerts. Most notifications can be sorted into either Priority, Default, or Silent, which behave differently depending on your default settings. You can also tap the Settings gear icon to dive into the app’s specific notification settings to disable categories of alerts. These will vary by app, but in many cases you can disable things like advertisements or news alerts without turning off messages you actually care about.

On iOS, you can find similar tools by swiping on a notification and tapping Options. Here, you’ll find quick shortcuts to do things like mute notifications from an app for a short period of time, or jump to more in-depth settings to disable categories of notifications. In my experience, it’s often easier to tweak these settings whenever I receive a particularly annoying alert, rather than audit all my notification settings at once.

Explore each app’s notification settings

Most apps have their own category of notification settings that can be adjusted individually. In some cases, these can overlap with the same settings you’ll find using the above method, but just as often, you’ll find a lot more toggles that don’t. Though, some apps are shadier than others in terms of how easy it is to find these settings.

For one instructive example, in the Reddit app, you can navigate to Settings > Account Settings > Manage notifications to find a lengthy list of possible alerts you can receive. That’s already pretty buried, but if you sign into the app with multiple accounts, you’ll need to go through this process for each account you’re signed into. Otherwise, notifications you turned off for one account might still pop up via another.

Most apps aren’t quite this chaotic, but it can still be annoying to dig through all the tedious menus. In some cases, this might be your only option, though. On Android, Reddit only has one notification category using the previous method, meaning you can only turn all notifications on or off at once. So, if you’re not finding the tools you need to selectively mute certain alerts in the OS-level settings, it might be worth digging through the app’s menus.

When all else fails, use third-party tools

It shouldn’t really be necessary to install an app just to get other apps to shut up, but if we must, then we must. BuzzKill, for Android, is a simple $4 app that gives you more robust tools to filter, manage, or suppress notifications than any of the built-in notification management settings.

What sets BuzzKill apart is that, on top of filtering notifications by which app is sending them, it can also filter alerts by things like words they contain, whether they have an image attached, or whether they’re part of a group chat. So, if you want to keep getting news alerts, but you’re just sick of hearing about that one guy who’s always in the headlines for some reason, you can selectively filter those out.

Unfortunately, this one’s likely to stay Android only, as iOS generally keeps apps in tighter sandboxes. BuzzKill needs to be able to read notifications from other apps in order to filter them, and that’s not something iOS generally allows apps to do. So, if you’re in the Apple ecosystem, you’ll have to stick with built-in tools for now.

More broadly, it also can’t hurt to let app developers know when you’re annoyed by their incessant pings. Companies might try to boost their engagement by testing how much they can poke your attention span before you turn them off (or uninstall the app) entirely. But turning off unnecessary alerts can send a signal that they’ve gone too far in the wrong direction. Sending feedback reports, where possible, can potentially send an even stronger signal.