How to Disable Pop-Up Banner Notifications for YouTube on Android

In this tutorial we will explain how to get rid of pop-up banners. For instance, we’d like to disable banner notifications about subscriptions, livestreams, comments & replies and messages in the YouTube app.

Android has various options for notifying you about updates and events in apps. They act and feel different. Say, you may be totally okay to receive notifications in the shade, but at the same time you may severely dislike the pop-up banners appearing at the very top that can prevent you from tapping on this part of the screen in other apps or even on your home screen.

The upper part of your screen will be simply unusable as long as the banner shows up. Besides that, you can be in the middle of tapping on something at the top of your screen when suddenly floating notification arrives and ultimately you tap on the banner instead of what you wanted to touch initially.

Consequently, your Android device switches the app, starts to play something with sound, you feel like things got out of your control and all this is very annoying. In prior versions of Android the feature we are talking about was called Heads-up notifications.

How to Disable Pop-Up Banner Notifications from the YouTube App (or Actually ANY App)

Follow the steps:

  • Hold down your finger on the YouTube app icon until the menu pops up.
  • Select App Info:
    YouTube app info Android 10Alternatively you can head to SettingsApps & Notifications (or Apps) → tap See all apps → scroll down and tap on the app you need to disable banner notifications for. 
  • When in the App Info select Notifications: modify notifications settings for an app on Android
  • Here we are interested in categories with the bell icon next to their names. They are able to alert you with sound, vibration and a banner pop-up across the top of the screen. 
    Select the category of notifications that you wish to modify. For example, Subscriptions: Select the category of notifications that you wish to modify
  • Here you need either to disable the Pop on screen option
    disable pop-up banners for certain category of notifications
    Method #1 to disable banner for certain category of notifications

    or switch the current notifications category from Alerting to Silent mode:
    switch current event category to silent notifications
    Method #2 to get rid of notification banners
  • Do the same to other alerting categories of notifications if you need: alerting notifications categoriesThat’s it! Since now on you won’t be bothered by banners.

Samsung Galaxy

The same settings look a little bit different on Samsung Galaxy with One UI. You need to dive in the certain category and then switch from Sound and pop-up to Sound:

Disable Pop up for notification category on Galaxy S10 OneUI

How to Completely Disable Notifications for Certain Event Categories in the App

Also note that you can disable certain notification categories by turning off the toggle to their right:

completely disable notifications for certain events

On the screenshot below I disabled not only sound, vibration and banners but even the notifications from the pull-down shade for Subscriptions and Livestreams categories.

The Last Option to Temporarily Get Rid of All App Notifications

The last option is to pause the app. This concerns not only YouTube, but any app on your Android device. Pausing means you can stop any notifications from a particular app until the next day.

  • Long press on the YouTube icon, so the menu pops up.
  • Select Pause: pause YouTube app
  • When you use the option for the first time, you need to confirm pausing: confirm pausing app

When you are ready to unpause it, just tap on the icon as you usually do to launch the app. You may be asked for unpausing confirmation when doing for the first time: YouTube is paused for the rest of the day - Unpause

Wrapping Up

I hope that you will find this article useful, despite the fact that the subject matter is rather tedious and confusing. Tell me, whether or not the guide helped you understand how to set up notifications and get rid of some of them.

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