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Take back control of your lock screen. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
I don’t think I’m alone when I say that notifications are a nuisance. There are simply too many of them, and the helpful ones are often drowned out by the spam. Whether promotional notifications should be allowed at all on our phones is an open question (I have my own feelings on that!). In the meantime, it is possible to coexist peacefully with your phone — it just takes a little work.
iPhone owners have more ways to fight the firehose of notifications than they used to, but it’s not necessarily an easy system to navigate. Here’s a quick primer on how iOS handles notifications and your options for taking control of them.
iOS notification basics
There are two places where your notifications can live on iOS: in recent notifications or…