How to Manage Your Increasingly Desperate App Notifications

My best friend messaged me on Facebook Messenger. It wasn’t urgent, so I swiped the notification away, making a mental note to reply later. Ten minutes later, Facebook sends another notification. “Reminder: [My friend] sent you a message.” This is clingy, even for Facebook. And it’s not the only app increasingly desperate for any crumb of attention. In just the last couple months, I’ve personally gotten dozens of what I can only call desperation notifications . Push alerts from apps that don’t really need anything, but would really like it if I gave them some attention anyway. These include, but are not nearly limited to, the following: The Disney+ app let me know that because I watched The Simpsons , I might be interested in watching The Simpsons Movie (which I also recently watched). Discord informed me that someone in a server I'm also in updated their status, which is, I guess, a thing you can do in Discord. Venmo would like me to know I can fund my Kalshi account with my Venmo balance. (I do not and will never have a Kalshi account.) Reddit began sending push alerts for news stories from communities I wasn’t subscribed to and had never visited. Duet sent an aggressive half-dozen notifications within 15 minutes of closing the app, including multiple alerts that read “She just likes you.” Which is a surprisingly exasperated tone for a dating app. GrubHub asked me if I wanted to order food, precisely five minutes after I ordered food. Some of these are obviously just advertisements disguised as alerts—its own annoying problem—but just as many seem to be little more than a reminder that an app exists. And if you could please open the app and boost its engagement numbers, that would be great. You May Also Like Are app notifications really getting worse? Wow, I hadn't thought of that, thanks Disney+. Credit: Lifehacker While it’s always hard to quantify vibes-based annoyances, there’s at least some data to back up the idea that companies are getting increasingly desperate for your notification attention. According to a 2025 analysis from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, news publishers have increasingly relied on push notifications to reach their audiences, as a way to avoid relying too much on platforms like Google or social media apps. However, this bid for direct attention comes at a cost—and in the midst of an arms race with platforms. According to the Reuters report, 79% of respondents don’t get any news alerts at all, and 43% of those are because users actively disabled the notifications. Worse yet, iOS and Android have both experimented with questionably reliable AI summaries of notifications , making them even more annoying to deal with. This report only examines one small segment of the notifications you might sift through on any given day, but it’s instructive of a broader trend. We increasingly live in an attention economy, where seemingly unrelated industries are in competition for your eyeballs. Which is how you end up with companies like Netflix investing in video games , or the video game industry competing with gambling sites and porn . In that context, your notifications become the frontline in the battle for your attention. No, it doesn’t take a genius to know that someone who watched The Simpsons might be interested in watching The Simpsons . But if a quick notification can remind me to watch more of the show today, rather than play more Pathologic 3 , that’s a win for Disney. And any win is going to be worth it to most companies right now. Broadly speaking, the economy isn’t doing so hot . So, if a company can do something to show that engagement in their app went up by even 5%, they likely will. And sending more notifications is generally one of the cheaper and easier ways to juice internal numbers. How to decrease app notification spam Credit: Lifehacker There’s at least one silver lining to the whole notification arms race problem: There are a lot of tools available to help get your alerts under control. Some are baked right into your phone’s OS, but there are also third-party tools you can use to enforce some peace and quiet. Here are some of the best options available. Use your phone’s OS-level settings to manage notifications Both major smartphone platforms have pretty robust tools to dictate what kind of alerts you can receive, and how disruptive they can be. We have full guides on tools for managing your Android and iOS notifications , but even if you don’t want to dive too deep into your phone’s settings, you can slowly whittle away the most annoying alerts as you receive them. On Android, you can long-press a notification in your shade to find options to tweak or suppress the alerts. Most notifications can be sorted into either Priority, Default, or Silent, which behave differently depending on your default settings. Yo