I love One UI on my Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7. It always feels just as cohesive as the stock Android experience on my Google Pixel phone.
While that sounds fantastic, there’s one recurring headache with my Galaxy devices: I am constantly drowning in app notifications.
Alerts are necessary to keep me in the loop. However, managing them on One UI feels like a full-time job, especially if I leave the factory settings untouched.
Thankfully, there’s an easy fix involving a classic Android feature called Notification Categories.
When enabled, I finally reclaimed control over pesky alerts and started managing them much smarter.
What is Notification Categories?
Why did Samsung turn this off by default?
Notification Categories is Samsung’s equivalent to Google Pixel’s Notification Channels. It offers granular control over which types of alerts an app can send.
It’s an essential tool because it lets me filter out fluff from apps I otherwise prioritize.
For instance, I can keep forecast updates and breaking news alerts from Samsung News and Google while blocking sports scores or Gemini Live prompts.
While there are overlaps with newer tools like Notification Highlights, Notification Categories is an older, separate utility for managing alerts.
It’s a feature I relied on heavily across previous Samsung devices, including the Galaxy Z Fold 5.
That’s why I was caught off guard when I couldn’t find it on One UI 8.5 on the Galaxy Flip 7. It turns out Samsung quietly disabled the setting by default, starting in One UI 6.1.
Even worse, digging it back up isn’t intuitive since it’s buried under layers of submenus. I genuinely don’t get why Samsung decided to hide such a useful tool behind so many hoops.
I had to resort to the AI-powered search in the Settings app, which ironically gave me two separate results when searching for notification categories.
The first was an integrated toggle within Galaxy Themes, and the second was Manage notification categories for each app. As you might guess, the latter was the culprit I was looking for.
It is tucked inside Advanced Settings alongside other notification toggles. It’s fine if you know the exact search terms, but it’s completely obtuse if you don’t.
Google Pixels and devices on stock Android have a similar feature called Notification organizer. You can access this through Settings > Notifications > App notifications > Notification organizer.
Using Notification Categories to manage each app’s alerts
I stopped missing important messages and notifications
When toggled on, the feature requires me to manage each app individually rather than housing every toggle on a single, centralized page. Regardless, I’ll let Samsung slide on that mild gripe.
You can start tweaking alerts by hopping into the main app menu from the home screen or digging through the app list in Settings.
I find it more efficient to jump in straight from the notification panel whenever an active alert pops up.
I also appreciate the broad third-party support. It lets me streamline apps like TikTok or Instagram. I can allow direct messages and other essential alerts while blocking spam and video recommendations.
Because of this, I can keep apps with tailored alerts instead of muting them entirely or letting them flood my notifications panel.
The sheer volume of spam hitting my screen dropped dramatically, saving me from manually swiping away every errant alert.
It’s also a nice safety net that ensures I don’t accidentally swipe past crucial notifications, as I have fewer items to keep tabs on.
It’s a tedious process
But it’s worth it to get rid of unimportant alerts
The obvious drawback with Notification Categories is that you have to configure each app’s supported toggles one by one.
It consumes time, making it a hurdle before achieving notification nirvana on my Galaxy devices.
I wish Samsung would offer cross-device syncing for notification preferences. It would spare me the headache of repeating this identical, tedious chore on every Galaxy phone or tablet I set up.
Granted, if you pair this with Notification Highlights, which relies on AI to summarize and prioritize incoming pings, you won’t have to tweak as many apps manually. You can hand off the lighter filtering duties to the system.
The major downside is that full contextual AI filtering is strictly reserved for recent flagships, leaving older or mid-range Galaxy hardware unsupported.
Is Notification Categories worth the hassle?
Even without shiny new AI features like Notification Highlights, Notification Categories remains an indispensable Android tool for cutting down on time wasted sorting through notification noise on Galaxy devices.
It takes some upfront effort to configure to get it fully running, but the hours saved in the long run make it a no-brainer.
It’s a minor oversight that Samsung buries this setting. And I hope it comes to its senses and turns it back on by default in future One UI builds, so average users don’t miss out on a cleaner notification shade.
But knowing Samsung’s track record of hiding classic and essential features, I won’t hold my breath.
