Is a group chat blowing up at an inopportune time and distracting the hell out of you? There’s an easy fix. You can hide alerts on your iPhone from a particularly noisy group chat in Messages. It’s like switching on Do Not Disturb — but for a single person or conversation. You can hide alerts permanently or temporarily.
With the Hide Alerts feature, you can silence alerts from a specific app in a similar manner, silencing it while letting all other notifications through. Better yet, you can hide alerts directly from your iPhone’s Lock Screen, which makes it easy to switch them on and off at a moment’s notice.
Watch our video or read on to see how.
Hide Alerts on iPhone from a single person, group or app
While the iPhone is a fantastic way to stay in touch, it can morph into a bit of a nightmare when you’re trying to concentrate on something and get blasted with a barrage of incoming messages. Luckily, there are several ways to go distraction-free on your iPhone. Do Not Disturb mode temporarily silences all notifications, with a few configurable exceptions for favorite contacts or people who call you twice in a row. And highly customizable Focus modes let you determine which contacts and apps can and can’t reach you during different situations and settings.
This method for hiding iPhone alerts is simpler and more targeted. If you only want that one person or that one app to stop pinging your phone, here’s a setting you can quickly enable.
Table of contents: Hide Alerts on iPhone from a single person, group or app
- Enable Hide Alerts from Messages
- Enable Hide Alerts from a notification
- More on managing notifications
Enable Hide Alerts from Messages
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
You can hide iPhone alerts from inside the Messages app. Just tap on a conversation, tap on the contact’s name at the top of the screen, and enable Hide Alerts.
A quicker way to switch this on or off is from the conversation list. Swipe left on a particular thread and tap the purple Mute button. A muted conversation will have a small crossed-out bell icon on the right side. Swipe left and tap the button again to unmute (show alerts).
Enable Hide Alerts from an iPhone notification
Screenshot: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
You can hide alerts from your iPhone Lock Screen as well. Simply swipe left on a notification, then tap Options. This menu gives you more choices for fine-tuning how long you want to hide the alerts. You can Mute for 1 Hour or Mute for Today, both of which are temporary and will resume notifications after the chosen period of time. Turn Off will disable all notifications until reenabled in Settings > Notifications.
This doesn’t just apply to text messages — you can find these settings for any app, then mute all notifications from that particular app, without affecting the rest. If there’s only one app that’s bothering you at the moment, this is a useful feature if you don’t necessarily need to go full Do Not Disturb,
More on managing notifications
After you learn how to hide alerts on your iPhone, dig into these other how-tos:
