iPhone notifications are no longer a nuisance with iOS 12

While Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference is usually a pretty flashy affair where the tech giant shows all of its latest software, this year’s event was a little more subdued. Instead of adding tons of new software features this year, Apple opted to focus on feature and performance improvements to make the overall user experience better.

One of the most exciting feature updates you find on iOS 12 is rather basic. Apple has completely changed the way the iPhone and iPad manage Notification updates. The messy clutter of cards that once filled your Notification Center screen has been replaced by something much more refined and easy to use. That’s right, Apple has finally embraced group notifications in iOS 12.

Reading and deleting notifications

While Notifications continue to appear as individual cards in iOS 12, they’re not categorized and stacked by app. For example, if you have a dozen Twitter notifications, instead of seeing each notification individually as you would on iOS 11, you’ll now see a stack of them with the most recent sitting on top. If you want to review all of your notifications, just tap on the top card.

Deleting notifications is also much quicker on iOS 12. Instead of closing each notification individually, you can now opt to delete all notifications for a specific app. And if you still find the number of notifications overwhelming, iOS 12 allows you to delete every notification in the Notification Center with a single tap.

Managing notifications

iOS 12 is doing more than simply changing the way you read and delete notifications, however. You now have several quick and simple ways to manage notifications directly from the Notification Center.

The easiest way to manage notifications in iOS 12 is simply by long-tapping on the card in question and tapping the three-dot menu icon. From here you’ll see three options: You can either have notifications quietly bypass the lock screen and appear only in the Notifications Center, or you can turn off notifications for a particular app altogether. On the same screen, there’s also an option to open the Settings menu to make changes to notifications for multiple apps.

But you may not need to make any adjustments to your notifications at all since Siri now can now provide contextual recommendations based on how you use your phone. For example, Siri may recommend turning off notifications for rarely used apps, or suggest apps that send frequent notifications be directly to the lock screen.