Samsung offers One UI 7 tools to filter notifications

Although notifications are essential for staying connected, many apps send notifications that aren’t important to you (like ads), cluttering the notification panel. Some apps post notifications simply to prevent Android from killing their background processes. The upcoming One UI 7 update for Samsung Galaxy devices will introduce a new feature to address this issue: notification filtering.

While browsing the latest One UI 7 beta 2 update on his Galaxy S24, Reddit user Fragmented Chicken discovered the new filter notifications functionality under Settings > Notifications > Advanced settings. This parameter “filter[s] notifications that are less important to you and which appear[s] them as a group at the bottom of your notification panel.

The feature lets you choose which types of notifications to filter: old notifications received “more than a few days ago”, background activity notifications that indicate that an app is running in the background, or notifications that you have manually reduced it in the notification settings.

When one or more notification types are filtered, One UI 7 displays an “X additional notifications” card at the bottom of the notification panel. Tapping this card expands filtered notifications, which are displayed in a “More notifications” section.

The filter for background activity notifications applies to notifications from applications such as KDE Connect, which publish notifications to avoid being suppressed by the Android operating system.

The minimized notifications filter applies to notifications that you have manually minimized in the notification settings. This setting normally moves the notification to the bottom of the panel and minimizes it by default. The new filter groups these minimized notifications, along with old and background activity notifications, into a separate section.

The filter for old notifications is designed to group notifications that have been present for a certain period of time, even if we don’t know the exact duration yet.

Samsung’s approach to reducing notification clutter is smart because it maintains visibility of less urgent notifications without letting them disrupt the main notification flow, a balance that other solutions often miss. We hope Google takes a similar approach in the future.

Google recently implemented its own fix for old notifications in Android 15 QPR1, but this feature completely hides the content of old notifications, potentially causing you to miss important information. Android’s solution to background activity notifications is to let you swipe them, but that requires you to later open the foreground service’s task manager to identify which apps are running so persistent. Samsung’s implementation provides this information directly in the notification panel, saving you an extra step. Google’s upcoming grouped notifications feature in Android 16, on the other hand, is something we’d like to see Samsung adopt instead of further changing existing notification behavior.