How to enable notification history on your Android (and why you should)

Notifications are an important piece of the mobile puzzle. They keep you informed and up-to-date throughout your day. 

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally deleted a notification I needed to read or brushed one off… only to find out l should have paid attention. Over the years, that issue has led me to miss out on some important communications, news pieces, and updates.

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Fortunately, Google offers two options for accessing your notification history, both of which are easy to use. Which one you use will depend on which version of Android you have on your device. I will demonstrate this feature on Android 14, but the process is the same for Android 11, 12, 13, and 15.

How to enable Notification history

How to access the Notification history

Now that it’s enabled, there are three ways to access the Notification history. The first is the easiest. Pull down your Notification shade once and scroll to the bottom of your notifications. You should now see a History button. If you don’t, skip the next two instructions. 

Tap History to access your past 24 hours of notifications.

If you tap any of those notification entries, you will open either the app that sent the notification or the settings for that app, from which you can reach the app. So, if you tap a Slack notification entry from the history, it’ll open the Slack app. 

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The second method is just another way to navigate to your history. Go back to Settings > Notifications. When you view the Notification history (where you enabled the feature), you’ll see your most recent notifications appear. This is the same page that appears when you tap the History button from within the Notification shade.

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However you access it, this is a great way to ensure you don’t accidentally miss a notification from any app or service on your Android device.

FAQ

Is there a way to see all your past Android notifications?

In short, no. Android only keeps the past 24 hours of notifications so they don’t clog up the local storage on your phone. At a certain point, all that locally stored data would slow down the phone until it became unresponsive, hence the 24-hour limit. There used to be third-party apps in the Google Play Store that were viable options, but those are either no longer available, no longer trustworthy, or cost-prohibitive for many.