How to Manage Notification Grouping on Apple Watch

Jan. 28, 2021

Notification Grouping is the right answer to preventing endless alerts from cluttering the entire Notification Center or the lock screen. With all the alerts organized in neat stacks based on apps or nature, you can navigate through specific notifications and find the ones you need a bit more conveniently. Furthermore,watchOS 7also lets you manage notification grouping on your Apple Watch so that you can choose a preferred way of stacking alerts or even disable it if you want the alerts to appear in a traditional way.

Manage Notification Grouping on watchOS

First up, let’s find out the difference between Automatic and By App notification grouping so that you can choose the right one as per your needs!

Just likeiOS 14, watchOS groups notifications in two ways: Automatically and By App. While automatic mode presents notification stacks based on nature like contacts, time, discussion thread, and more, “by app” mode groups all notifications in a single stack per app. As to which notification grouping mode should you choose, it completely depends on your preference.

Personally, I like to group notifications in a single stack per app for specific apps likeexpense trackers/personal financeand activity. It offers me the convenience to check out all the alerts from an app in a single stack in a clutter-free manner. Besides, it also ensures I do not have to look anywhere else to find the desired alerts for the same app.

And I choose to go with the automatic mode forapps like newsandreminders. watchOS takes advantage of machine learning to monitor how you interact with alerts and stacks notifications for a tailored experience. Depending on personal taste, you can choose the desired notification grouping style for each app. Let me show you how it works the right way!

Do note that watchOS lets you manage notification grouping per-app basis. So, you will need to dive into each app to fine-tune the setting.

2. Now, tap on theMy Watchtab at the bottom left corner of the screen. Next, tap onNotifications.

3. Next up, findthe app(which supports notification grouping) in question.

4. Up next, tap onNotification Grouping.

5. Finally, you havethree optionsto choose from:

Select the desired option and you are good to go!

So, that’s how you can manage notification grouping on your Apple Watch. Now that you know how each alerts grouping mode works, choose the preferred option as per your needs. It would have been better had watchOS offered an option to select the system-wide notification grouping style.

Hopefully, Apple brings it in the watchOS 8. Anyways, thanks to some pretty useful features likesleep tracking,battery health, andhandwash detection, watchOS 7 seems to have checked off almost all the boxes. What do you have to say about the latest watchOS version and what are the new features you would like to see in the watchOS 8? Let us know in the comments below.

An old school bibliophile who turned a tech nerd out of obsession. When he is not digging into hacks and tracking down stories that are breaking the internet, you may find him reciting poems.