How to silence notifications on iPhone

How to silence notifications on iPhone
How to silence notifications on iPhone (Image credit: Laptop Mag/Sean Riley)

"How to silence notifications on iPhone" is one of the many questions I get as a smartphone expert. While Apple has introduced a number of features in recent years to help deal with notification fatigue, it's typically an all-or-nothing situation. Finally, thanks to iOS 15, there's a way to temporarily mute notifications for any app on an iPhone.

Now if you just have that one pesky app that you need to ignore for an hour or the rest of the day, you can do that in just a few simple steps.

Most of Apple's notification-stopping features to date have taken the use a cannon to kill a mosquito approach, shutting down notifications for an app forever or blocking out all notifications. With iOS 15, you can get more surgical with your notification strikes.

How to silence notifications on iPhone

  • Swipe down from the top left side of your screen to bring up Notification Center
  • Slide a notification from the app you want to mute slowly right to left to reveal Options and Clear
  • Tap on Options
  • Select Mute for 1 Hour or Mute for Today

How to temporarily mute notifications for any app on an iPhone

(Image credit: Laptop Mag/Sean Riley)

That's it! When the app's timeout is over it will go back to notifying you as normal. If you do want to make the arrangement more permanent, you can tap Turn Off in the Options menu or View Settings to make changes to the style of notification or sound.

More handy iOS 15 tips:

Sean Riley

Sean Riley has been covering tech professionally for over a decade now. Most of that time was as a freelancer covering varied topics including phones, wearables, tablets, smart home devices, laptops, AR, VR, mobile payments, fintech, and more.  Sean is the resident mobile expert at Laptop Mag, specializing in phones and wearables, you'll find plenty of news, reviews, how-to, and opinion pieces on these subjects from him here. But Laptop Mag has also proven a perfect fit for that broad range of interests with reviews and news on the latest laptops, VR games, and computer accessories along with coverage on everything from NFTs to cybersecurity and more.