If you pull down your notification shade right now, you probably have a ton of notifications in there that you can’t get rid of. Those are persistent notifications, and they can be pretty annoying. Especially if you’re OCD and want your notification shade to be clear all the time (like myself). Luckily, you can disable those persistent notifications, and never have to worry about seeing them again.
How To Disable Persistent Notifications
Wait til you get one of those persistent notifications.
Once you get one, hold on it, until you enter the app’s notification menu.
From there, you can tap on “Details” which will be on the left side – the other two options are “Cancel” and “Minimize”.
Once you get into the app notifications settings for that app, you can tap on the “Persistent Notification” and just turn it off, or jump into even more settings. One of the settings that might be better is changing the Notification Style to “Silent and Minimized”. This means it won’t make noise when it appears, but it will also be minimized and out of the way.
You can turn it off completely, but that might not be the best thing to do, especially if it’s for an app like a password manager. Where you can tap on the notification to fill in the login field for the app you are in – instead of going to that app and logging in and doing it manually.
How To Disable Sticky Notifications
These are notifications that are persistent, but you can’t turn them off at all. With these, you can still hold on the notification in the notification shade. You’ll get the same three options as described above: Details, Cancel and Minimize.
Here you’ll want to tap on “Minimize”.
This is going to make the notification smaller so you can see the app is still running, but it’s not in the way or blocking any other notifications.
Wrap Up
These persistent notifications are not anyone’s favorite. But they are a necessary evil. You see, these notifications will indicate to you that there is an app running. Even if you don’t know that it is running in the background. Google made this change in Android a few years ago, so any app that is running in the background must use a persistent notification so that you know it’s running. This means that you won’t think that an app has gone rogue, and is running in the background collecting data and wasting your battery life.
But it is a good thing that you can actually disable these notifications or at least minimize them. Pulling down that notification shade and seeing a ton of notifications there is not something that everyone likes to see. Especially those that like to keep that notification shade nice and clean. So minimizing them is a good compromise for everyone. At least until we can group of all these notifications into one section – which is coming in Android Q, fortunately, and that will land on Samsung devices by the end of the year.