While notifications are essential for staying connected, many apps clutter your notification panel by sending notifications that aren’t important to you, such as ads. Some apps post notifications just to prevent Android from killing their background processes. The upcoming One UI 7 update for Samsung Galaxy devices will introduce a new feature to solve this problem: notification filtering.

While digging into the latest One UI 7 beta 2 update on the Galaxy S24, Reddit user FragmentedChicken discovered the new feature Filter notifications under function Settings > Notifications > Advanced Settings. This setting “filters[s] Display notifications that are less important to you[s] They appear as a group at the bottom of the notification panel.

This feature lets you choose the types of notifications you want to filter: old notifications received “a few days ago”, background activity notifications that indicate an app is running in the background, or notifications that you have manually minimized in notification settings.

When filtering one or more notification types, One UI 7 displays an “X more notifications” card at the bottom of the notification panel. Click this card to expand the filtered notifications, which appear under the “More Notifications” section.

The filter for background activity notifications applies to notifications from applications such as KDE Connect, which post notifications to avoid being killed by the Android operating system.

The minimize notifications filter applies to notifications that you manually minimize in notification settings. This setting usually moves the notification to the bottom of the panel and collapses it by default. The new filter groups these minimized notifications, as well as old and background activity notifications, into a separate section.

The filter for old notifications is designed to group notifications that have been around for a while, although we don’t know the exact duration yet.

Samsung’s approach to reducing notification clutter is smart in that it keeps less urgent notifications visible without letting them disrupt the main notification flow, a balance that other solutions often miss. We hope Google takes a similar approach in the future.

Google recently implemented its own fix for old notifications in Android 15 QPR1, but the feature completely hides the content of old notifications, potentially causing you to miss important information. Android’s solution for background activity notifications is to let you swipe them away, but this requires you to later open the Foreground Services Task Manager to identify persistently running apps. Samsung’s implementation provides this information directly in the notification panel, saving you an extra step. On the other hand, we’d like to see Samsung adopt Google’s upcoming bundled notifications feature in Android 16 rather than further disrupt existing notification behavior.