Why does Samsung feel the need to mess up Android notifications?

While switching to the Galaxy Z Fold 7 as my primary phone over the past few months, there’s just one thing that continues to annoy me. Samsung apparently feels the need to mess up Android notifications, and it’s the weirdest self-sabotage.

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Notifications on Android are one of the main strengths of the platform, especially compared to iOS where notifications are simply bad – I will not accept arguments about this today.

But, for some reason, Samsung actively chooses to sabotage some of the best parts of Android notifications, and there are several examples.

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The most recent one that I was reminded of is that, by default, Samsung turns off the ability to snooze notifications. On Pixel phones and many other Android phones, there’s a small wake-up button at the bottom right of any notification that, when pressed, reveals a menu with preset times. Tapping on one of them will dismiss the notification and reappear later. It’s super useful! But, for reasons I can’t understand, Samsung turns this feature off by default.

Likewise, Samsung disables Android notification categories by default. This feature allows users to turn off certain notifications from an app based on how the app sets that notification. So instead of an all or nothing approach, you can choose what you get. An example of how this can be used is with Instagram. Don’t want to be informed about comments, likes, subscribers, etc., but still be notified when a message arrives? You can do this! But again, for reasons I don’t understand, Samsung doesn’t allow users to do this by default. Instead, they have to go through the settings to re-enable it.

There’s also the whole notification history debacle.

I said my article about how Android OEMs, particularly Samsung, threw this feature under the bus. Samsung not only forces you to navigate through multiple Settings menus to find notification history, but the functionality is also completely broken. If you tap an old notification, it just opens the app instead of the actual content, while notification history on the Google Pixel (that’s on Android before Samsung took care of it) just treats the historical notification as a new one, opening the content as you’d expect.

The list of problems really goes on from there. Another example is that Samsung recently ruined the usefulness of lock screen notifications by default, with users having to go to their settings just to make notifications visible again.

Personally, I just don’t understand.

Android introduces these awesome and useful tools for managing notifications, and Samsung just says “oh, our users don’t need them” and turns them off. I’m glad they still exist in software, but the very annoying truth is that most Samsung Galaxy users have absolutely no idea about the existence of these features. So they are not asking for this change to be made.

What do you think? Is Samsung ruining Android notifications? Do you use these features? Did you know they existed? Let’s discuss it!

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