iOS 9: Interact with Notifications on Your iPhone and iPad

If you miss an alert on your iOS device, you can view it within Notification Center, which is accessed by swiping down from the top of the screen.

If you tap on that “Notifications” tab I’ve indicated, you’ll see all sorts of info from the apps you’ve allowed to send you such things. 

Wow, they send me A LOT of news.

One of the lovely things about this easily accessed list is that you can interact with the items on it. If you tap on a notification, it’ll pop you into the associated app, often right to the place you need to go. If you instead swipe from right to left across one, the choices will differ depending on which app sent it. With Messages notifications, for example, here’s what you’ll get:

Touch the “X,” and it’ll delete the notification and mark the text as read; if you tap “Reply,” it’ll pull down a little box for you to do that, without even opening the Messages app. Neat! It’s fun to try out all the ways you can interact with the notifications from other places, too, like Mail…

…and some third-party apps, like the New York Times

…or Tweetbot.

I find it much faster to swipe down on the screen to access this feature than to find the app in question and then tap around until I get where I need to go! I’m all about speed.

And finally, if you’d like to change which apps are allowed to send you these alerts, visit Settings > Notifications

To change the preferences for an app, just tap on it.

If either “Allow Notifications” or “Show in Notification Center” is off, you won’t be able to do anything I’ve described above, but maybe that’ll be a good thing if you have an app that sends you stuff too often. Not that I’m insinuating anything, there, New York Times.