There are a variety of reasons why you would want to keep the messages that appear on your iPhone hidden, particularly those that appear when your phone is locked.Perhaps you have something planned for your lover. Perhaps receiving personal communications is frowned upon at your business. Maybe you don’t want strangers to be able to see your text messages when they appear on your iPhone.It merely takes a few seconds to conceal text, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and other notifications for whatever reason. It’s also simple enough to hide individual text message chains or the texts from a specific sender.
How to Hide iPhone Message Notifications
You can turn off notifications completely or on a case-by-case basis (app-by-app, for example) if you don’t want messages to appear on your iPhone screen.
- Launch the Settings application.
- Scroll down to “Notifications” and tap it. This will bring up a large list of all of your phone’s apps that send out notifications.
- To turn off all notifications, go to the top of the screen and hit “Show Previews,” then “Never.” You can also choose “When Unlocked” to only see messages when your phone is unlocked, and you’ll only get notification notifications when your phone is unlocked.
- To turn off notification alerts from specific apps, such as your text messages, go to the notifications tab and scroll down until you find the app you want to turn off, then press it.
- Toggle “Allow Notifications” off to disable all of the app’s displays, or uncheck the choices you don’t want just below (“Lock Screen” e.g.).
If you disable all notifications, you’ll have to open each app separately to read any messages you’ve received, or you’ll have to launch certain apps with limited display settings.
You can also choose to just get notifications in your Notification Center, which you can reach by sliding down from the top of the screen. Alerts will not appear unless you enter the Notification Center in this situation.
How to keep messages hidden from specific senders
There are two ways to hide individual text chains or prevent a single sender’s messages from getting through to where they can be seen if you don’t want to hide all of your alerts.
To remove message notifications from a specific text message chain, follow these steps:
- As the chain continues, open the message(s) you don’t want to appear.
- Tap the icon of a face (or the person’s picture) near the top of the screen.
- Tap the I for “info” on the taskbar that appears.
- Toggle “Hide Alerts” on.
When a new text from this chain arrives, an alert will no longer appear on your screen, but you will still get the text.
To keep communications from being seen by a specific person:
To begin, double-check that you have the person’s contact information written down somewhere else.
- Tap “Edit” in the top right corner of the contact whose texts you want to conceal.
- Scroll down, and hit “Delete Contact,” then tap “Delete Contact” on the popup window to confirm.
- Go to the Settings app and scroll down to “Messages,” then hit it.
- Scroll down and select “Filter Unknown Senders” from the drop-down menu.
The message sent by the person you removed (or anyone not in your contacts) will now be saved in a different folder from your other communications.
