No time to deal with a notification on your Android phone? Here’s how to snooze them. They appear again later as a reminder. Snooze notifications and see your notifications history later.
Notifications are essential for keeping up with what’s new in apps, email, messages, social and more. Without them we would need to open our email app, social apps, messenger and so on, just to see if there was anything new.
When notifications arrive, they demand your attention and sometimes they require you to perform some action, like replying to an email or message, adding an appointment to your calendar and so on. However, sometimes you don’t have time right at that moment. Perhaps you are in a meeting for the next hour, in an online video call or something similar.
If you snooze notifications on your phone, they are put off until later. This dismisses it, but only temporarily. You can schedule it to reappear later when you have more time to deal with it. Normally, dismissing notifications makes them disappear forever, but the option to dismiss them for a short period of time is very useful.
- Improve privacy on Android phones with the Privacy dashboard
- Manage Google Play budget and purchases on Android phone
- Android app permissions: Check before and after installing
Snooze notifications
I will be using a Samsung phone with Android 12. Other phones and other versions of Android may be slightly different, but any recent version will be similar. If you don’t see a snooze button, the second part of this guide shows how to enable it.
1 View notifications
Pull down from the top of the screen to see the latest notifications on your Android phone. Each notification has a down arrow (V) on the right to expand them. Press it on a notification you want to snooze.
2 Snooze button
When a notification is expanded, it may show more information or options to deal with it in some way. In this case it is a trivial notification about a photo from a long time ago, but let’s pretend it is something important, but I don’t have the time to deal with it right now.
Tap the bell icon in the bottom right corner of the expanded notification.
3 Dismiss until later
Now there are options to dismiss the notification, but show it again later. These snooze notifications settings are very useful. The options are 15 minutes, 30 minutes, one or two hours. Select one of the options and then press Save. This notification will reappear after the selected time.
This was a trivial notification, but imagine you are in a meeting and get an important one that you don’t want to forget about. Setting it to reappear later makes sure you don’t.
4 More notification options
This is a different type of notification. Expanding this Yahoo Mail notification shows three options, Reply, Star and Delete. Another way to deal with things like emails later is to star them. The next time you open your email app, you can view starred emails and deal with them.
View notifications history
There are several useful notifications settings, like suggesting actions, snoozing, reminders, and notification history. Let’s see how to configure them.
1 Notifications options
Open the Settings app on your Android phone and press Notifications. Some phones may have notification history here, but on my Samsung phone you must press Advanced settings at the bottom of the screen.
2 Enable notification actions
Turn on the three switches in the lower part of the screen: Suggest actions and replies for notifications, Show snooze button, and Notification reminders.
What we have come here for is Notification history. Press it to see what you have missed.
3 View notification history
If notification history is turned off, turn it on with the switch at the top. It will then save future notifications.
If the switch is already on, a list of recent notifications is shown. They are grouped by app and there is an expand (V) button on the right to view the individual notifications. You only see the last 24 hours, but this is still very useful and it is a way to see events after they have been cleared from the pull down notifications screen.
4 Set notification reminders
Some notifications are more important than others and you might not want to forget about them, especially if they require some action. Return to the Advanced settings screen and press Notification reminders.
Turn on the switch and then press Remind every. You can choose to have your phone remind you that a notification needs to be dealt with every few minutes. It will bug you until you do.
It would be very irritating if every app pestered you every few minutes, so press Select apps to get reminders for and choose which apps you want. Keep the number to a minimum, like a work email that is important, for example.
