When you’re flooded with notifications, you can easily miss out on important ones if you regularly swipe them away. As a result, cleaning up your phone’s notification center can make you easily miss essential updates, messages, and warnings.
Recovering your deleted notifications is simple but requires turning on your notification history. Our guide shows how to find your notification history and turn it on or off when needed, whether using a near-stock Android version or One UI from one of the top Samsung Galaxy phones.
Activate and check your Android notification history
Some smartphone makers deactivate notification history by default. If notifications are turned off on your Android phone, you can easily activate it. We show you how to do that using a Google Pixel, but the steps are similar on other Android devices.
- Swipe up from your home screen to open the app drawer menu.
- Tap the cog wheel icon to open your Settings.
- Open Notifications.
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Select Notification history.
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Look through your dismissed notifications. Turn on the Use notification history toggle from the Notification history menu if you haven’t already.
You can now dismiss any of your notifications and have your notification history to fall back on.
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An easy shortcut to accessing notification history is tapping the No notifications in the cleared notifications panel.
Activate and check notification history on Samsung Galaxy phones
Samsung uses a different Android skin called One UI. The steps to activate and access the notification history differ slightly on Samsung phones.
- Swipe up from the home screen and open Settings.
- Scroll to Notifications.
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Open Advanced settings from the Notifications menu.
- Select Notification history.
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Turn on the Notification history toggle.
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Swipe down from the top to open the notification center. Dismiss any app alerts and check them from the Notification history menu.
Notification history shows your alerts chronologically, with the most recent at the top. However, the system doesn’t offer a way to place a notification history shortcut on the home screen for easy access.
Does your notification history record notifications for deep-sleeping apps?
Samsung has a feature for sleeping apps. It automatically puts apps into deep sleep or forces them into deep sleep mode if they remained unused. Asleep apps won’t run in the background, update, or send notifications.
The downside to sleeping apps is that you miss notifications entirely if you keep these apps asleep for extended periods since your notification history won’t record them. If you’re worried about missing out, re-open your apps occasionally to prevent them from going into a deep sleep or set it to your Never sleeping apps list.
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How to prevent apps from ‘sleeping’ in the background on Android
Keep your notifications syncing on time with these steps
Deactivate your Android notification history
Notification history doesn’t come with biometric protection. Anyone with access can check the last 24 hours of your notification history through your phone. Sometimes, you may not want the system to save confidential notifications from apps like Venmo or Telegram. If that’s the case, you should turn off your notification history entirely, as there’s no current way to set a notification history for individual apps.
- Open Settings and go to the Notification history menu (refer to the steps above).
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Turn off the Notification history toggle and confirm your decision.
Doing this deletes all your notification history. You can re-activate it to keep your history again, but the system doesn’t restore your current notification history.
Snooze notifications on your Android phone
Instead of dismissing notifications, snooze alerts and receive them at a more convenient time. After you activate notification snoozing from your Android phone’s settings menu, you’ll see a clock icon beside each notification. You can tap it to snooze notifications for up to two hours.
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Keep in touch with community updates without fail
Never miss an important message on your phone
As our guide outlines, you can retrieve lost notifications with a few taps if you accidentally dismiss them. After turning on the notification history, you only have to check back within 24 hours to avoid missing out. Otherwise, if you are worried about missing important text messages, we recommend not deleting them, as retrieving deleted messages becomes trickier if they aren’t stored on the cloud.
