How To Quickly View Past Notifications On Android

Missed notifications are a thing. It’s the point at which you dismiss a notification only to later realize that you need it. You might dismiss it by mistake or intentionally but once you do, there’s rarely any getting it back. Some apps have their own inbuilt notifications panel. Twitter and Facebook are one of such apps. If you normally dismiss notifications from either of these apps from your device lock screen, you can still get to see them inside the app. Not all apps have their own notification panel though. Truth be told, the majority of apps don’t have one. The good news is that Android always maintain a log of every notification you get. You can actually use this log to see past notifications on your Android device.

Access The Notification Log

Getting to your notifications log is a very terribly complicated process. To such an extent that you’d experience a hard time remembering how to get there. Luckily, with Android, there is always an easy approach to get things done. In this situation, you can use a simple widget. You won’t even need to install a third-party app or anything. All that you require is already on your device.

Tap and hold on your home screen. You will enter an editing mode for the home screen. Tap on Widgets, and from the list of widgets, you can also add, select the Settings app widget.

The Settings app widget allows you to add a shortcut to any setting on your home screen. If there is a setting that you always access often, you can use this widget to quickly jump right to instead of going through the Settings app. Once you’ve selected the Settings app widget, it will ask you which “setting” you want to attach to it. Simply pick the notifications log.

That’s it. The Settings widget will be added to your home screen and it will point to you the notification log where you can view all past notifications. Simply tap the widget to jump straight to the log.

Limitations

This added shortcut will show you a list of all the notifications you’ve received although, they aren’t the richly designed notifications you see in the Notification shade. They can reveal to you which app sent the notification, what the notification was for, and what time you received the notification. There is Additional information that isn’t relevant like the app package name, the title, the intent, and so forth. If you tap on this notification, it actually does nothing, It won’t take you to the app that sent the notification.

The good news about it is that it will show you the text that was in the notification. For instance, when you get a notification from Gmail about a new email, a short snippet from the email is added to the notification. The log will show you this short little snippet which includes the sender’s name. You can actually use this information to find the email that you’re missed.

If you are not running stock Android, the log may be accessed more easily, or it may not be accessed via the Settings widget.