iOS 16

iOS notifications: Three ways to change the design

Chance Miller | Nov 21 2023 - 9:17 am PT

To coincide with the new Lock Screen widgets in iOS 16 last year, Apple also redesigned the notification system. Notifications appear at the bottom of your Lock Screen rather than at the top below the clock.

This change has proven to be controversial for many iPhone users over the past year, and iOS 17 doesn’t make any changes to the design. But there are a few settings you can tweak that might improve the experience for you…

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iOS notification changes

At the time, Apple said that the new bottom-up design for iOS 16 notifications was meant to reduce the clutter on your Lock Screen. The idea is that by moving notifications to the bottom, you can see more of your wallpaper. This also includes things like widgets, depth effect wallpapers, live wallpapers, and more.

This means that your notifications will automatically start appearing at the bottom of your Lock Screen. You can swipe up these notifications to view more of them and quickly delete them, tap on them, and manage notifications on a per-app basis.

But there are ways to customize this design. If you head to the Settings app and tap on “Notifications,” you’ll see three different options. Each of these options is for customizing the appearance of notifications at the bottom of your Lock Screen.

iOS 16 notifications — From left to right: Count, stack, and list

Count: This replaces notifications on the Lock Screen with a simple piece of text that tells you how many unread notifications you have. You can swipe up to view a full list of your notifications.
Stack: This option takes all of the notifications from each individual app and “stacks” them up. So you have individual groups of notifications for each app on your Lock Screen and in the Notification Center.
List: This is the traditional iOS system for notifications from previous years. You’ll simply see a list of all your notifications that you can expand by swiping up from the bottom of the Lock Screen.

Top comment by BlueGoggles

Liked by 125 people

The fact that they have ‘Notification Center’ hidden from view if you turn your display off without viewing notifications is the epitome of poor design. Apple used to design intelligently, which is to say, in a simplistic manner that resulted in the greatest percentage of iPhone users knowing how to use a feature. The hidden Notification Center is unknown to greater than 95% of iPhone users in totality. That’s horrendous design. If you turn the display off and then back on, it pushes all notifications to this ‘old’, hidden list. Try this for yourself. You have to swipe upward near the bottom portion of the Lock Screen to get them to display again. The Lock Screen should be the Notification Center 100% of the time, and absolutely no notifications should disappear until the user specifically acts on them, by way of tapping, or swiping to dismiss it. That would reach 100% of iPhone users, while their current implementation causes 95%+ to never see the ‘old’ notification banners. And yes, I emailed Federighi about the failures of both the notifications populating from the bottom of the screen, and the hidden, ‘old’ notifications. Yes, he responded to me (or someone in his staff). I sincerely hope Apple engineers visit 9to5mac comments to see how their products are being taken, so they can read my scathing review of these features.

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An interesting tidbit that I discovered from the MacStories review of iOS 16 last year is that you can also temporarily enable “Count” at any time by simply dragging downward on notifications that are on your Lock Screen; this will minimize and only show the number of notifications.

Unfortunately, what you can’t change is the placement of the notifications. There’s no option to revert to the “classic” notifications design that Apple used prior to iOS 16.

What do you think of the current design for notifications on the Lock Screen? Have you gotten used to the new bottom-up design, or are you still hoping for a way to revert? Let us know in the comments.

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