Digital Wellbeing makes it easy to prevent certain apps from interrupting your busy day.
Google is going out of its way to help you take control of your mobile devices. One route the developers have taken is allowing users to define what apps are allowed access to notifications. With this newly refined system, users decide how much they want their phone interrupting them throughout the day.
But how do tackle this task? There are a number of ways you can control what apps can notify you. If you happen to run Android Q, you can work with Interruptive or Gentle reminders. If you're still working with Android Pie, a better way to take care of this is through Digital Wellbeing. From within this app, you can disable specific apps from notifying you of updates. This can be a real boon when you can't silence your phone (because you need it for business), but don't want the likes of Facebook or Twitter reminding you every other minute that one of your many followers liked a post. Those particular types of notifications can get really annoying—to both you and your clients.
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If you happen to have a device running a version of Android that includes Digital Wellbeing (in other words, Android Pie or later and currently only on specific devices), you, too, have more options for controlling pesky notifications. Let's find out how.
Accessing digital wellbeing
By default, you won't find a launcher for Digital Wellbeing in the App Drawer. Instead, you open the app from Settings | Digital Wellbeing (Figure A).
Figure A: Launching Digital Wellbeing from within Settings.
Disabling notifications
From within the Digital Wellbeing main window (Figure B), tap Manage notifications.
Figure B: The Digital Wellbeing main window.
In the resulting window (Figure C), you can scroll through the listing of apps and tap the On/Off slider to disable notifications for specific apps.
Figure C: Facebook notifications have been disabled.
Once you disable the notification for the app(s) in question, they will no longer interrupt you throughout your day.
Why this method?
Using Digital Wellbeing to silence specific app notifications has one major benefit—it makes for very quick and easy control. In other words, instead of hunting down how to return apps to their default ability to access notifications, you can simply return back to the Manage notifications window and re-enable notifications for those apps you disable. This method is much more efficient than any other.
Although Digital Wellbeing offers a number of other important features, I found the ability to easily manage app notifications to be its best feature. If you happen to have a device that includes Digital Wellbeing, you owe it to yourself to start using it for this specific purpose. By silencing some of those apps, your busy work day will get a bit less frustrating.
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