WhatsApp: New feature lets you block notifications you don’t care about

The update should ensure you never get bugged by pointless alerts from the app in the future

Men pose with smartphones in front of displayed Whatsapp logo in this illustration September 14, 2017 (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic)

WhatsApp now lets you organise your notifications by importance, and block the ones you don't want to see.

It lets you decide which types of alert you receive from the app are urgent – such as those for group chat messages – and which types you don’t actually want or need to see – such as those that pop up when you’re trying to send a large media file.

The messenger app has just been updated to support Notification Channels, a relatively new Android feature that rolled out with Oreo last year.

WhatsApp offers 10 Notification Channel categories, which you can control individually.

These are: Group Notifications, Message Notifications, Chat History Backup, Critical App Alerts, Failure Notifications, Media Playback, Uncategorised, Other Notifications, Sending Media, and Silent Notifications.

Each category contains several different options.

You can turn notifications for each category on or off, or mark them as Urgent (make sound and pop up on screen), High priority (make sound), Medium priority (no sound) or Low priority (no sound or visual interruption).

You can also decide what sound a notification makes, and decide whether or not to allow the notification content to appear on your lock screen.

You can access these categories by tapping and holding the next WhatsApp notification you receive, and selecting the All Categories option that appears.

While WhatsApp’s support for Notification Channels is unlikely to drastically change the way you use the app, it should ensure you never get bugged by pointless notifications in the future.

The feature was first spotted by Android Police, which reports that it’s currently only available in the beta version of WhatsApp.

That’s where the company tests new and experimental features, before rolling them out officially. You can sign up to it here.