Why does Samsung feel the need to ruin Android notifications?

In my switch to the Galaxy Z Fold 7 as my main phone in recent months, there’s just one thing that continues to annoy me. Samsung seemingly feels the need to ruin Android notifications, and it’s the most bizarre self-sabotage.

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Notifications on Android are one of the platform’s main highlights, especially compared to iOS where notifications are simply bad – I will not be taking arguments on that today.

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

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The most recent one 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 little alarm clock button to the bottom right of any notification which, when pressed, reveals a menu with preset times. Tapping any of those will dismiss the notification and resurface it at a later time. It’s super useful! But, for reasons I can’t fathom, Samsung disables that by default.

Similarly, Samsung disables Android’s notification categories by default. This feature allows users to turn off select notifications from an app based on how the app defines that notification. So, instead of an all or nothing approach, you can choose what you get. One example of how this can be used is with Instagram. Don’t want to get notified of comments, likes, followers, etc, but still get notified when a message arrives? You can do that! But, again for reasons I don’t understand, Samsung doesn’t let users do that by default. Instead, they’re left to dig through Settings to turn it back on.

There’s also the whole notification history debacle.

I’ve said my piece on how Android OEMs, especially Samsung, have thrown this feature under the bus. Samsung not only makes you dig through multiple Settings menus to find notification history, but the feature is also completely broken. If you tap on an old notification, it just opens the app instead of the actual contents, whereas notification history on Google Pixel (i.e. on Android before Samsung messes with it) just treats the historical notification as a fresh one, opening up the contents as you’d expect.

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

Personally, I just don’t get it.

Android presents these awesome, useful tools for managing notifications, and Samsung just says “oh our users don’t need those” and turns them off. I’m glad they still exist in the software, but the very annoying truth is that most Samsung Galaxy users have absolutely no idea these features exist. As such, they’re 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!

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Why does Samsung feel the need to ruin Android notifications?

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