Notification Grouping is the right answer to preventing endless alerts from cluttering the entire Notification Center or the lock screen. With all the alerts organized in neat stacks based on apps or nature, you can navigate through specific notifications and find the ones you need a bit more conveniently. Furthermore, watchOS 7 also lets you manage notification grouping on your Apple Watch so that you can choose a preferred way of stacking alerts or even disable it if you want the alerts to appear in a traditional way.

First up, let’s find out the difference between Automatic and By App notification grouping so that you can choose the right one as per your needs!

  • Difference Between Automatic and By App Notification Grouping
  • Choose the Preferred Style of Notification Grouping on watchOS

Difference Between Automatic and By App Notification Grouping

Just like iOS 14, watchOS groups notifications in two ways: Automatically and By App. While automatic mode presents notification stacks based on nature like contacts, time, discussion thread, and more, “by app” mode groups all notifications in a single stack per app. As to which notification grouping mode should you choose, it completely depends on your preference.

Choose the Preferred Style of Notification Grouping on watchOS

Do note that watchOS lets you manage notification grouping per-app basis. So, you will need to dive into each app to fine-tune the setting.

  • Off: Select it to turn off Notification Grouping for this specific app.
  • Automatically: Choose it to let watchOS stack notifications for this app depending on nature. (By default, this mode is selected.)
  • By App: Select this option to allow watchOS to group all notifications into a single stack.

Select the desired option and you are good to go!

So, that’s how you can manage notification grouping on your Apple Watch. Now that you know how each alerts grouping mode works, choose the preferred option as per your needs. It would have been better had watchOS offered an option to select the system-wide notification grouping style.