Samsung’s giving One UI 7 tools to filter notifications

While notifications are essential for staying connected, many apps send notifications that aren’t important to you (like advertisements), cluttering the notification panel. Some apps post notifications simply to prevent Android from killing their background processes. The upcoming One UI 7 update for Samsung Galaxy devices will introduce a new feature to address this problem: notification filtering.

While digging through the most recent One UI 7 beta 2 update on his Galaxy S24, Reddit user FragmentedChicken discovered the new filter notifications feature under Settings > Notifications > Advanced settings. This setting “filter[s] notifications that are less important to you and show[s] them as a group at the bottom of your notification panel.”

The feature lets you choose what types of notifications to filter: old notifications that were received “more than a few days ago,” background activity notifications that indicate an app is running in the background, or notifications that you manually minimized in notification settings.

When one or more notification types are filtered, One UI 7 shows an “X more notifications” card at the bottom of the notification panel. Tapping this card expands the filtered notifications, which are shown under a “more notifications” section.

The filter for background activity notifications applies to notifications for apps like KDE Connect, which post notifications to avoid being killed by the Android OS.

The filter for minimized notifications applies to notifications that you manually minimized in notification settings. This setting normally moves the notification to the bottom of the panel and collapses it by default. The new filter groups these minimized notifications, along with old and background activity notifications, into a separate section.

The filter for old notifications is designed to group notifications that have been present for a certain period, though we yet don’t know the exact duration.

Samsung’s approach to reducing notification clutter is smart because it maintains visibility of less urgent notifications without letting them disrupt the main notification flow, a balance that other solutions often miss. We hope that Google will adopt a similar approach in the future.

Google recently implemented its own fix for old notifications in Android 15 QPR1, but that feature completely hides the content of old notifications, potentially causing you to miss important information. Android’s solution to background activity notifications is to let you swipe them away, but this requires you to later open the foreground service task manager to identify persistently running apps. Samsung’s implementation provides this information directly within the notification panel, saving you an extra step. Google’s upcoming bundled notifications feature in Android 16, on the other hand, is something we’d like to see Samsung adopt instead of further messing with existing notification behavior.