I’m Drowning in Push Notification Slop, and You Probably Are Too

Max McCaskill - Sr. Staff Writer

Updated 22 October 2026

iPhone Notification Center filled with ads and engagement notifications from apps — Engagement slop and ads are taking over my
iPhone’s Notification Center.
Image: Max McCaskill

Whether you realize it or not, there’s a good chance your smartphone’s notification feed has been hijacked. Instead of showing you important information like text messages, emails, or news alerts, it’s been overrun by ads, engagement bait, and low-effort spam messages from the apps on your phone. This is called push notification slop, and it’s rapidly become a silent driver of digital fatigue.

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Here’s the situation: Apps want user interactions, and developers have discovered one of the easiest ways to get users to open their apps is to send clickbait push notifications to lock screens. They’re basically delivering ads or engagement reminders to your device in a way that bypasses spam filters.

Most of these notifications are useless and will simply push more important alerts down the screen, forcing you to scroll through ads just to see your messages from friends, missed calls from family members, verification codes, and work emails. After a while, they can even leave you ignoring most of the notifications that pop up on your phone, causing you to miss things.

The situation has gotten bad enough that AI assistants like Gemini and Siri AI can now select which notifications to prioritize to help users sort through the bloat. But sorting digital spam notifications doesn’t stop them or keep your phone from buzzing every time one arrives.

Even worse, the volume has grown so large that many users don’t even realize the true number of notifications pinging their phone every day. Instead, most people ignore them, not knowing that this is something they can easily fix.

Hi there! I'm Max, and I'm a wireless industry expert. What does that mean? For one thing, I get paid to play on my iPhone. But more than that, it means I've spent years reviewing carriers, testing smartphone hardware, and reporting on the news that impacts your phone bill.

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What is push notification slop?

First, let’s define what push notification slop is, because you’ve probably been getting it for years and never knew it had a name. Push notification slop is any low-effort notification that’s designed to get you to open an app or make a purchase. These notifications don’t pass along messages or important information. Instead, it’s your own apps hijacking your lock screen for advertisements and engagement bait.

Some examples of push notification slop include:

Shopping apps sending ads about products you may be interested in or warning you there’s only a limited supply of something you’ve previously viewed
Social media apps pinging you with messages of “someone viewed your profile” or “you may know this person”
Food delivery apps suggesting restaurants or offering small discounts to incentivize you to make an order
Mobile games sending ads about a digital currency or informing you rewards are waiting if you open the app
News apps sending out clickbait headlines or low-impact stories that aren’t relevant to your interests
Dating apps warning you about losing a match or offering a free boosted profile for a limited time

I’m willing to bet you've seen many of these notifications on your own phone. However, you may not have realized they're basically spam. After all, these notifications are coming from apps you’ve put on your phone, so it feels like you should be able to trust them. Plus, they’re often linked to reputable apps like LinkedIn, Amazon, Duolingo, DoorDash, or Candy Crush.

That familiarity is what these apps are exploiting. While you may like these apps and frequently use them, they're blasting your lock screen with useless notifications every single day. Essentially, when you agreed to receive notifications after initially downloading an app, you opted into all forms of their messaging, from important alerts to ads and clickbait.

To be clear, these notifications are not scams or fakes, but they are low-effort, easy to repeat, and designed to get you to engage with an app when you weren’t planning to. And since push notifications go to your lock screen and not an inbox, there is no spam filter to hide them. They simply get mixed in with the important notifications you actually want to see.

I’m not reading half the notifications on my phone every day

All of this means you’re likely getting a ton of notifications you don’t need and won’t interact with. You can easily find how many notifications you’re getting in your iPhone’s Screen Time statistics or your Android’s Digital Wellbeing controls.

When I audited my own notification count, I was shocked to see I was averaging 150 notifications per day, and many of them were useless. On one recent day, I received 152 notifications, and only 75 of them were things like messages or important alerts. The rest were mostly clickbait news stories, social media posts I had nothing to do with, game notifications, and ads.

iPhone Screen Time notification statistics showing a daily average of 150 notifications — My iPhone’s Screen Time feature showed
I average 150 notifications per day.
Image: Max McCaskill

The numbers paint a pretty stark picture: On any given day, I’m ignoring half the notifications that hit my phone because they’re spam. These notifications are also incredibly exhausting and tend to pile up in my Notification Center because there’s very little value in sorting through them.

You already have the tools to reclaim your Notification Center

The good news is that you don’t have to suffer through push notification slop. Many apps let you opt out of advertisement-style notifications, which cuts off most of the bloat. However, the option is typically buried in the settings of the app itself, so you may have to hunt for it or look up how to find it.

From there, you should also think hard about which apps even need notification permissions. For example, unless your mobile game has a daily reward or alerts that require you to interact with something to progress, you probably don’t need constant reminders to play.

Shopping apps are another great example. If Amazon or Temu is bombarding you with ads, you can disable their notifications entirely and rely on your email for important things like shipping updates. You can also change the types of stories that are shared from news apps to ensure it’s only breaking news that hits your screen.

Unfortunately, push notification slop is likely to continue and may even get worse. AI has made it extremely easy to churn out massive numbers of targeted notifications that have just enough of your data to get you to interact. Plus, since developers know on-device AI features are now acting like spam filters and sorting out their junk notifications, they’ll likely look for ways to make them seem like important information or emergencies, tricking their way into your priority messages.

So here’s your job going forward: The next time you get an irritating notification, immediately open the app and figure out how to disable it. Slop notifications are sent out constantly, so you won’t have to wait long. If you adjust each app’s permissions every time you get one, you’ll probably have your notifications cleaned up in just a few days.

Max McCaskill

Sr. Staff Writer

Max is a Senior Staff Writer at WhistleOut, specializing in mobile plans, operating systems, and carrier news. He regularly tests and reviews dozens of phone plans firsthand, evaluating real-world data speeds, coverage reliability, and plan features. He's been featured in publications such as Yahoo Finance, AARP, AP News, and GoBankingRates.

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