Samsung disables notification categories with One UI 6.1, here's how you can get it back

The Galaxy S24 series smartphones brought One UI 6.1. Last month, Samsung rolled out the new software customization to older devices as well. While it brings a ton of new and useful features, it also introduces a bunch of issues. Now we’ve discovered that the tech giant has made a change to notification management that could annoy a few users.

Since Android 8.0 Oreo, Android has been offering a feature called notification categories (also known as notification channels), which allows you to select the kind of notifications an app can send and the kind it can’t. For example, you could use this feature to allow Instagram to send notifications about comments and prevent notifications about likes. Samsung has also been offering this feature in its smartphones and tablets with One UI.

As it turns out, Samsung has disabled this feature by default on its smartphones and tablets with One UI 6.1. So, if you had used notification channels for an app on One UI 6.0, those customizations will not work with One UI 6.1 by default, and some users are very annoyed about it. Fortunately, you can enable this feature manually, and once you do, all your customization will reappear. To enable this feature, go to Settings » Notifications » Advanced Settings and enable ‘Manage notifications categories for each app'.