Do you enable notification history? The answer is complicated.

One of the many cool little features on Android is the ability to view your notification history, allowing you to view a reverse-chronological log of all the alerts on your smartphone.

Is this something that Android Authority readers actually use, though? We tried to find out the answer to this question by running a poll earlier this week. Here’s what you told us.

Do you have notification history enabled on your phone?

Results

Over 2,500 votes were counted in our poll as of writing, and it turns out that 46.2% of respondents said they’ve enabled the notification history option on their smartphones. Interestingly enough, a few readers noted in the comments that they forgot the feature existed (or didn’t know it existed) and subsequently enabled it.

Opinion: The notification LED needs to make a comeback

Meanwhile, 31.21% of polled readers said they didn’t have it enabled on their phones. We’re guessing that people who vote for this option are happy to deal with alerts in the notification shade and forget about them once they’ve been swiped away.

Finally, almost 23% of respondents said they’re not sure whether the feature was enabled on their phones. It’s not exactly the most visible feature around, so we’re not surprised if some readers chose this option. It’s also worth pointing out that those who voted “no” and “I’m not sure” accounted for just over half of all votes.

Comments

• dasistwalter: I don’t use it often but when i do I’m really happy that it’s there
• splus: This is not even available in stupid Xiaomi’s MIUI! It’s amazing how many Android features are missing in MIUI.
• ScubaMntMonkey: I forgot to enable it on my new phone, but had it on my last phone (enabled it now, thanks for the reminder).. Like above, I don’t use it often, but have a few times & happy I had it on.
• Dan: I like seeing this history so I can see which ones to turn off… I hate notifications!!!
• Jeff Namhie: Nope. Who misses notifications?
• David:I have it enabled, and use it occasionally. I would like to see it improved in the following way: some notifications, like from security cameras, embed a thumbnail or even a short video clip into the notification. This is not stored in the history (not even for a more limited timeframe to respect storage) and I would like for it to be.
• Cryio: I have had this feature enabled since Sept 8 2020 when Android 11 launched.
• HelloThere: Never knew it was a thing. I’ve only ever used Android for a few years but still. I could’ve used this for a lot of things in retrospective.
• thinking_face: Feel like this is a setting that should be on by default
• Sophia: Well, I answered no, but that is mainly because I didn’t know it existed. Now that I am aware of it, I might actually start finding that useful.