Notification History is a great feature introduced in Android 12. If the name doesn't already tell what it is, the feature allows you to see the history of notifications that you have previously dismissed on your device. This is especially useful for people who like to swipe away notifications more often than naught, and accidentally swipe away a notification they meant to open. With this enabled, you can always check the notifications you dismissed and never have to worry about missing an important notification!
If your phone is prone to notification overload, you may be the unintentional victim of your own aggressive swiping in an effort to reduce the clutter. Amidst clearing the clutter, you accidentally dismiss an important message, email, or prompt before you got a good look at it. Well, Android 12 brings a feature that makes that mistake a thing of the past.
Enabling Notification History in Android 12
The feature keeps track of all your notifications, but it only keeps track of notifications after you have turned the feature on. It will not act retroactively and help you recall notifications when the feature was off. However, this will help you avoid situations similar to the latter and make sure you never miss another notification again – even by accident.
To start, open your Settings and navigate to Notifications.
When in Notifications, navigate to Notification history and enter the option.
From here, you will see a toggle that lets you enable the feature. Just give it a quick toggle to the On position and you're done.
If you want to quickly access it again, you can swipe down on your notifications shade and you will see History at the bottom left of your notification shade.
From here you can quickly jump to the feature in fewer steps, and freely toggle the feature on or off. Keep in mind, that any notifications dismissed while the feature is off will not be recalled by it. This is worth mentioning should you decide to toggle it off.
Another quirk worth mentioning is that in this menu, some apps will directly open the notification for you in the app. E.g. an Email in Spark will directly open up the email for you, but others will just show you the notification settings for that particular app, e.g. Snapchat or Telegram. As such, this isn't the perfect system yet, but it helps make sure you don't miss anything important ever again!
