Samsung One UI 6.1 continues to play with Android’s best feature – Android Authority

There’s a simple solution, yes, but the fact that it’s a membership option is a baffling anti-consumer move, especially when Channels are – in my opinion – one of the best features of ‘Android.

When people ask me why I keep buying Android phones instead of iPhones, I have a list of iOS drawbacks ready to go: the inconsistent return gesture, the poor keyboard location, and the menu confusing sharing. But the first argument is the management of notifications. I tried several times; The way iOS handles notifications is extremely bad. I can write one-page essays about everything that’s wrong, but the main reason is the default all-or-nothing approach to notifications.

If you want to be notified of your delivery order from a merchant app, you must accept all notifications from the app, which may include advertisements, offers and unnecessary distractions. On iOS, it’s up to the app developer to do the right thing and create a settings screen in their app where you can enable or disable certain types of notifications. Twitter, for example, has a dedicated Notifications menu in its settings, which allows me to allow replies and direct messages but ignore alerts about new followers or retweets. So I can choose what deserves my attention and what doesn’t deserve my attention.

The problem is twofold: 1) it’s up to the user to dig into every app they use and see if it has a special notification settings menu somewhere, and 2) not all developers do not the effort to implement it, to begin with. And it’s always the most spammy applications that take advantage of the situation. They know you need a specific type of alert from them (deliveries, transportation, financing, etc.) and also use the all-or-nothing approach to send you unnecessary promotions and stuff.

Android’s approach is different. Notification channels were introduced in Android 8.0 Oreo, in 2017. The idea is that as soon as you open an app’s notification settings, you can easily ignore a particular subset of notifications, i.e. -say a channel, without too much problem. Channels are a default Android API where app developers can group different types of notifications. It took a few years for most app developers to adopt this feature and not let everything happen in one channel, but now almost every app on my list of 100+ apps uses them.

In Google Maps, for example, I can keep directions and transit notifications, but turn off Q&As and recommendations. In Deliveroo (an UberEats competitor), I can turn off ads and offers while still keeping order updates. When I set up my parents’ phone, I can turn off all the notifications I don’t want them to worry about or mess with while still keeping the important ones streaming.

Better yet, on stock Android phones, like the Pixel series or Nothing Phones, tapping the settings on any current notification opens the channel list and highlights the exact one it’s coming from – look at the highlight around the “Informational” channel for my Synology DS. Router application above. This allows me to quickly identify the culprit of a new deluge of spam notifications and disable it.

TL;DR: Channels are one of the best ways to deal with notification chaos, and I can’t go back to before they existed. I like to control what bothers me and what requires my attention, so anything that is superfluous is just a waste of time for me.

Samsung phones that ship with One UI 6.1 out of the box, like the Galaxy S24 series, for example, don’t offer Notification Categories – Samsung’s name for Channels. By default, you can either fully opt-in to all notifications from an app or opt-out completely. There is no fine adjustment available.

Now the same thing happens on all phones updated to One UI 6.1. Installing the update disables the default notification categories. So even if you’ve chosen your preferred alert settings for an app, you can no longer see or control them. Either you are fully registered or you unsubscribe.

Worse yet, One UI doesn’t show the handy highlight when you tap a notification, so there’s no easy way to tell which category it comes from. It’s up to us to figure this out (usually by digging through notification history, but that’s a whole other story). Unfortunately, no regular user will ever know.

How to fix notification categories in One UI 6.1

When I first noticed the problem on my Galaxy S24 Ultra, I contacted the biggest Samsung fan I know, Zachary Kew-Dennis, and asked him to investigate. In an article on Android FontZachary discovered that One UI 6.1 now has a new toggle to completely enable or disable notification categories, and it did the trick!

To turn it on, go to Settings > Notifications > Advanced settings and activate the toggle to Manage notification categories for each app.

Once this setting is enabled, a new Notification categories The menu will appear under any app’s notification settings. See the example below for the Galaxy Store app. After enabling the toggle mentioned above, the categories appear at the bottom of the screen.

There you will find the notification groups that a developer has created for their application. And you will be able to control each one individually.

In the case of the Galaxy Store, I immediately deactivated the category of Instant readings And Events, because I don’t care. I kept the others, but I can control each one individually, so, for example, I can keep app update notifications silent because I don’t want them to interrupt me.

Just undo this change, Samsung

As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, this is a bad decision for Android. Hiding one of the platform’s most useful features is not good for users. This undoes all the good that Android has done in getting developers to adopt channels/categories and giving us more control over the dozens of alerts we receive each day. And I honestly think this takes Android a step back.

Worse yet, making it a membership toggle and forcefully unsubscribing everyone by default when updating to One UI 6.1 is just a baffling bad decision. Imagine you set up your notifications exactly how you wanted, and now you’re receiving too many or none and you have no idea what’s wrong!

The iOS version of One UI 6.1 has gone too far. Bad, Samsung, capital-B Bad.