How to view old and dismissed notifications in Android

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Published 16 Mar 2014

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Disclosure

The notification bar is one of the key strength of Android especially with the ability to view, dismiss and interact with notifications from third party apps right from it. However, what if you accidentally dismissed an important notification and want to retrieve it again? 

Thankfully, if you are running a recent version of Jelly Bean or KitKat, it is possible to retrieve your old and dismissed notifications with a simple trick. Here’s how.

Step 1: On the home screen of your Android device, place a 1×1 Settings Shortcut widget and select “Notifications” from the available list of shortcuts.

Notifications history

A shortcut to view all your old and dismissed notifications

Step 2: Now, whenever you will tap on the Notifications shortcut on your home screen, it will display a list of all your notification in the reverse chronological order.

You can also disable notifications from third party apps by tapping on their names and then removing the tick from the “Show notifications” option. Keep in mind that the log of all your notifications is cleared every time you reboot your Android device.