I cannot count how many times I have swiped away a notification and instantly regretted it. One second it’s there, the next it’s gone, and that is always when you actually want to read it. The good news is that Android has a feature that can help you retrieve those dismissed alerts, but the bad news is that it’s not turned on by default.
Notification history is a simple, yet useful feature that lets you revisit alerts you’ve received throughout the day. Beyond that, it also helps you see which apps are distracting you the most, so you can take control of your notifications instead of letting random apps hijack your attention all day long.
What is notification history and why it’s a big deal
Your undo button for notifications
Android’s notification history feature keeps a log of your recent notifications. So even if you dismiss an alert without reading it, or accidentally tap that Clear All button, you can still open the notification history menu and find it there. This is especially important when you dismiss notifications without noticing which app it came from.
And this is not just a simple list of old alerts. Notification history is an interactive archive. You can tap on recent alerts to jump straight into the app. This is one of the features I miss the most every time I use an iPhone.
The notification history menu lists all your recently dismissed alerts at the top. If you scroll down, you’ll find a list of your apps, along with how many notifications each one has sent in the past 24 hours. You can tap an app’s name to expand it and view all its recent alerts.
One thing to note is that the older notifications you see lower down the list are not interactive. This means tapping on them won’t take you to the app. Instead, it will take you to the app’s notification settings menu.
Turning on notification history is easy
Hidden, but ridiculously simple
The notification history is one of the first things I enable on every Android phone I use, and it only takes a few taps. All you have to do is head to Settings > Notifications > Advanced settings > Notification history and turn on the toggle at the top. Your Android phone will now start logging your notifications automatically.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind. Notification history does not backfill older alerts, which is a bit of a bummer if you are only discovering the feature now. It only starts recording alerts from the moment you turn it on. Also, when you turn this feature off later, it will remove the entire log. Even if you re-enable it, your previous history won’t come back.
This free app reads all my notifications aloud while driving
Notification management while driving made easy.
It gets better if you have a Samsung phone
Notification history feature on steroids
Android’s notification history is already great, but if you have a Samsung phone, you can give it a serious upgrade with a Good Lock module called NotiStar. It is essentially a supercharged version of Android’s built-in notification history.
Instead of being locked to a simple 24-hour log, NotiStar lets you store notification history for the past 7 days, 30 days, 6 months, or even a full year. That alone makes it worth using, as you can look back on your alerts from long ago.
NotiStar also lets you configure what gets saved. You can tell it to only track notifications from specific apps, so your log does not get cluttered with useless alerts. There’s even a search bar that lets you look up notifications by keywords.
However, the most useful NotiStar feature is that it adds a small shortcut right on your lockscreen. You can simply tap on it, unlock the device, and access your notification history log right there. And if that’s still not convenient enough, you can add its widget to your home screen and view your notification archive at a glance.
Good Lock
Good Lock is a powerful customization suite for Samsung Galaxy devices, offering a collection of modules and plugins that let you personalize almost every aspect of your phone. With Good Lock, you can tweak the lock screen, home screen, navigation bar, keyboard, notifications, and more to match your style and workflow.
How notification history reduces overload
Less noise, more focus
Besides checking your missed alerts, you can also use notification history to reduce notification overload. After all, the constant stream of alerts is one of the biggest problems with modern smartphones, and it can get annoying really fast.
Since notification history shows you exactly how many alerts each app has sent in the past 24 hours, it becomes easy to spot the worst offenders. It could be that random shopping app that you used only once, a news app that thinks every minor update is breaking news, or a game that refuses to stay quiet unless you hear about its latest energy refill.
Once you’ve identified the apps making the most noise, you can dive into their notification settings to manage them better. You can either turn off notifications from such apps entirely, or at least silence them.
Notification history is not something that you might need daily, but you’ll be glad you enabled it when you do. And it’s just one of the many useful features that is disabled out of the box. There are plenty of other Android features that can make your life easier.