Hi there,
I work for a software company and we have an own app, so I sometimes need to present to customers using my iPhone. In that situation I need push notifications from our own app, but I would like to avoid notifications from WhatsApp, Facebook, email and so on.
So my goal is to disable notifications for these specific apps, ideally with a shortcut. So that I’ll be able to enable them again after my presentation.
Unfortunately the apple shortcuts app doesn’t support to set notifications for other apps.
Do you guys have experience with that? I already looked at ‘Scriptable’ and ‘Pythonista’, but for me it appears that these apps don’t have permissions for settings like this. (Though, I’m not a developer).
Shortcuts doesn’t have the ability to toggle such settings. You may be able to create a shortcut that takes you directly to the Notifications section in Settings, but you’d still have to manually toggle on/off.
Hi,
Thanks for your answer. OK, I assumed that.
Are apps in general not allowed to toggle such settings? Or could there be one (theoretically) that could do it? Or a script app?
Apps are sandboxed and allowing an app to override another app’s settings, or even its own notifications enable me to settings, like this would be a security and a usability issue. Imagine a competitor’s app being able to turn your notifications off and it’s notifications on even though a user set it up the other way around.
Federico’s page with Settings URL schemes is indispensible. The URL scheme to jump directly to Notifications Settings is prefs:root=NOTIFICATIONS_ID, but after you get there, you have to do all the turning on and off by hand.
No, unfortunately I didn’t find a solution. It seems not to be possible at this point of time.
However, I created a feature-request at Apple. If you may do the same, the probability is higher that we get such a functionality with Shortcuts
Could you just use the downtime feature? It’s a toggle switch in settings. You can use it to disable all apps except the ones you want to use during the downtime plus phone calls. You can set the default time to all day and just use the toggle switch to turn it on before a demonstration and off afterward.
I originally signed up to say thanks Travis!!! But then I tried to use safari when in downtime and found you cannot allow it. Therefor I cannot use safari when I am trying to use safari whilst not getting work emails.
Well I can but I have to allow every website that I click on. It very annoying.
I think this will never happen as it violates the fundamental security design of iOS. The user has to make the changes for an app, not another app. You can see, with a little thought, what a disaster it would be to allow a app to modify the settings from other apps. Would you want the Facebook app to be able to control your notification settings for all applications?
I’ve got your shortcut working to open the main notification page but how do I specify an app like you did with WhatsApp etc. At the moment I have to scroll through and find the app to then go and turn notifications off after using the short cut - which is better but not perfect.
I’m trying to use this for the bbc sport app
Would you mind sharing the next steps? I did everything you said, and I got the bundleid, but from there how do I get the shortcut to toggle the Allow Notifications button either ON or OFF?
Ideally I would create 2 of these shortcuts so I could run one to turn the specific notification ON, and one to turn it OFF.
Oh…
There are no next steps.
I couldn’t get any closer to a quick on/off toggle then that.
Maybe there is a magic command you could add to the end of the URL scheme, but I am not enough of a witch to know that.
But please share if you discover it
Just to confirm, that isn’t possible. It is only a shortcut to the section. It does not offer greater granularity to set individual settings. In fact we have even had OS updates break and change the section links in the past, so setting individual settings via URL I doubt is a priority at Apple if it is even a consideration.
