Hi Dave. My boyfriend claims I get an unnatural number of notifications on my iPhone when we’re together. I’m wondering, is there a way to see how many each of us gets on a daily basis so we can compare?
I certainly hope that your boyfriend is just poking fun at your popularity with this discussion, not paying overly close attention to what’s happening on your iPhone! Having said that, this is a perfect example of where upgrading to the latest version of iOS, iOS 12, is going to reap some serious benefits. Among the many highly visible new features is one that’s quite subtle: Screen Time. Implemented as a response to criticism that people spend too much time on their mobile devices, turns out that the Screen Time tracking has some additional benefits.
If you’re not worried about how much time you spend on your device, you might simply ignore this feature as most people do with iOS12, but trust me on this, Screen Time is quite interesting data to peruse nonetheless. But let’s not just talk about it, let’s have a look. Fortunately, I’ve been running iOS 12 on my iPhone X long enough that I have a week worth of data…
To get to Screen Time look for it in the Settings app:
See it at the very bottom there? Just below the also super useful Do Not Disturb feature?
Tap on “Screen Time” and it’ll bring up the following screen, but without the fancy graphic and information:
Not sure why it takes so long, but just wait on this screen and after 10-20 seconds the graphic will indeed show up for you. I guess there’s a lot of data being analyzed behind the scenes or something. Anyway, eventually, you’ll see the above.
Notice that I do use my phone a lot, an average of 5 hours and 33 minutes, which is apparently more than double the average. Ahhh my bad, I suppose. 🙂
There are various settings you can access here, including Downtown, App Limits and similar (particularly useful for a child’s iOS 12 device – think iPad too! – but for adult over-users too). You don’t want any of that, however, you want to tap on your phone name just above the graphic. In my case, it’s “iDave X”.
A tap on that and here’s what’s revealed:
Notice on the top you can look at just today or an average of the last seven days. You’ll get better and more useful information by tapping on “Last 7 Days“. Notice on the graph that my daily usage is pretty consistent and that I don’t really unplug much even on a weekend. I do, however, spend a lot of time reading news and in news apps like BBC and USA Today to keep up on current events (that’s the light blue in the bar graph).
Swipe down from the above view, however, and you’ll find some additional interesting information. Wondering how often you pick up your smartphone on a 24 hour period? I seem to pick mine up a rather staggering 108 times/daily on average. Below that, however, is what you seek, information on Notifications:
As you can see, I get about 250 notifications daily, mostly from the Messages app and Gmail. But you can also see that my smarthome bugs me too: Both SmartThings and Nest are part of my home security network and they account for almost 400 notifications in the last 7 days!
Armed with this information, you can also get this from your boyfriend’s iPhone running iOS 12 and compare to find out who really does pick up their phone more and get more notifications. Good luck!
Pro Tip: I have a lot of useful iPhone help here on the site, please do spend the time to check it out while you’re here! Thanks!
