How to stop news notifications on your smartphone
Sick of Google spamming your phone with notifications about news articles? They come from the Google News app, and they can be very annoying, especially if the featured stories aren't relevant to you. Fortunately, there's an easy way to stop them completely. With a bit of tinkering, you can also reduce and refine the alerts.
How to stop news notifications
To completely turn off news notifications, fire up the Google News app, tap your user icon in the top-right corner and hit Settings > Notifications.
The toggle at the top of the page will let you turn all Google News notifications off.
Oh, and if you don't ever use the Google News app, you can simply uninstall it.
How to reduce news notifications
Of course, unless Google really doesn't know you at all, not every news notification you receive will be irrelevant.
If your main issue is with the sheer number of news notifications you receive, the answer is the tool that sits directly below the aforementioned toggle on the same page.
It's labelled �Number of notifications', and by default it will be set to �Standard', which actually sits much closer to the high end of the scale than the low end.
Simply drag the dot to the left to reduce the number of news notification you receive from Google News. Chances are you'll keep having to revisit this tool in order to find the right balance.
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How to make your news notifications more relevant
The rest of the notifications settings page is filled with toggles, which you can use to refine the alerts that you receive from Google News.
For a reminder of the news notifications you've received in the past, you can head back to the Google News app's home screen, tap your user icon, and hit the �Notifications & shared' button.
There you'll find a long list filled with the news stories that the app has alerted you to, and when you received those alerts.
When you have a decent idea of the topics and types of stories you'd like to continue to receive notifications for, go back to the notifications settings page (return to the app's home screen, tap your user icon > Settings > Notifications).
Here's where you can fiddle with the toggles that represent different areas of interest.
It makes sense to keep receiving alerts for breaking news, for instance, but if you're not interested in things like announcements for new magazine issues and featured content, you can turn those toggles off.
You can also continue to refine the alerts within the notifications themselves. Just expand the notification by dragging your finger down on it, and tap the �Fewer like this' option.
