How many times have you deleted a notification, only to wish you still had that information handy? Personally, it’s happened to me on enough occasions that when I discovered it was possible to enable notification history in Android 11, I immediately switched the feature on.

With notification history enabled, even if you do miss a notification, you won’t really miss it. Why? Because you can always check the history of your phone’s notifications and view everything you’ve dismissed.

You might not think such a feature important–until you need it. When that eventuality arrives, you’ll be glad the Android developers not only made it possible, but also made it simple.

Let me show you how.

SEE: Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2020: Galaxy Z Fold2, Samsung Galaxy S20, and more (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

What you’ll need

The only thing you’ll need to enable the notification history is a phone running Android 11.

How to enable notification history

To enable the notification history, open the Settings app. Locate and tap the Apps & Notifications entry. In the resulting window, tap Notifications (Figure A).

Figure A

The Notifications section in the Apps & Notification window.

Next, tap Notification History (Figure B).

Figure B

The Notification History entry in the Notification window.

In the resulting window, tap the On/Off slider until it’s in the On position (Figure C).

Figure C

Enabling the Notification History feature for Android 11.

Viewing your notification history

Once you’ve enabled the feature, you should start seeing entries populate the window. This should also indicate where you view the notification history. Whenever you need to view, you go back to Settings | Apps & Notifications | Notification History. If you tap on a particular entry, it will either do nothing or open the notifying app so you can view the contents of the notification.

The one caveat to this feature is that it only shows dismissed notifications from the past 24 hours. This is intentional, in order to avoid your device storage from filling up with a notification history log.

And that’s all there is to enabling the notification history on Android 11. With this working, you’ll never miss another notification again. For some users, this will quickly become a regularly used feature on the Android platform.

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