Snapchat Notifications Won't Turn Off: 152 Reviews (2026)

There is a specific kind of Snapchat review that shows up over and over this summer, and it is not "too many notifications". It is narrower than that and much easier to check. The reviewer says they went into the settings, turned everything off except messages from friends, and the notifications kept coming anyway.

The notification controls are completely useless. I have every single toggle turned off except for direct messages, yet Snapchat constantly spams my phone with random, cringey Spotlight suggestions, story alerts, and irrelevant clickbait.

Riddled with ads and promoted content now. In addition, I have every single type of notification turned off besides messages from friends, yet I STILL get random notifications from promoted content. I only use this app to stay in touch with a few friends from ten or so years ago.

Two reviewers, writing on the same day in August, give the mechanical explanation that would make all of this make sense.

Just discovered today in the notifications setting that certain settings for their promotional stuff can not be turned off. If you switch it off, the moment you leave the settings page it turns back on.

notifications that you cant mute or stop, some of which are ads and they intentionally make it so if you switch the notifications off it wont save and as soon as you leave the screen it turns back on.

We cannot verify that claim. What we can do is count how many people are describing the same experience, and check whether it got worse and when.

We read the 18,000 newest Google Play reviews of Snapchat from the United States store, dated 29 June 2026 to 3 September 2026, a 66 day window. Of those, 5,541 are one to three stars and 1,672 are substantial, meaning at least 120 characters. 183 of those mention notifications. We read all 183 by hand, set aside 31 that were about something else entirely, and were left with 152 verified complaints, 9.1% of the substantial negative set. 128 of the 152 are one star, or 84.2%.

On Google Play, Snapchat holds 4.22 stars from 39,716,704 ratings across more than a billion installs, with 5,214,374 one star ratings. The current build is 14.22.0.48, shipped 1 September 2026. The iOS listing holds 4.51 from 5,924,141 ratings. The app carries ads and sells in-app purchases, which is the context for a large part of what follows.

The Finding: This Roughly Tripled In August

Notification complaints are permanent background noise for any messaging app, so a raw count says nothing. The useful question is whether the rate changed. Sorted by the app version the reviewer was running, it did, and sharply.

Across the seven builds from late June to early August the rate sits between 4.6% and 9.6%. On the build that first appears on 12 August it is 15.0%, and on the next one it is 25.3%. That is roughly a tripling, and it holds on the newest build in our window.

The calendar tells the same story independently, which matters because it does not depend on which build anyone happened to be running. In July, 38 of 690 substantial negative reviews are notification complaints, or 5.5%. In August it is 102 of 881, or 11.6%. In the first three days of September it is 9 of 66, or 13.6%.

A caveat we are not going to bury. Snapchat ships weekly, so newer versions correlate with more recent reviews and the two tables are not fully independent. What makes the finding hold up is that the older builds keep collecting reviews right through the window, from people who have not updated, and their rate stays at six percent while the newer builds sit at twenty. If this were a calendar effect alone, the old builds would have climbed too.

What The 152 Reviews Claim

Seventy nine of the 152, 52%, make a specific claim about the settings rather than a general complaint about volume. Those break down like this, and they overlap.

The remaining 73 are complaints about volume without a settings claim. We are counting them in the 152 because they describe the same product behaviour, but they are not evidence of anything about the controls, and the tripling above holds whether you count them or not.

Claim One: The Setting Is Off And It Still Arrives

This is the largest group and it is remarkably uniform. Almost all of them describe the same configuration, which is everything off except direct messages from friends.

I've turned off all notifications except for snaps sent to me, and the app still keeps sending notifications for random stuff I don't care about

I specifically have spotlight push notifications disabled so, why am I getting spotlight push notifications??? What part of DISABLED do you not understand??

Switched off all notifications except for messages. Sc have started sending me daily notifications for adverts and content I have no interest in.

App has started sending ads in the notifications, ignoring my user settings to only push notifications for messages from friends.

Spams daily with Spotlight notifications and "Content you might like" despite turning off those notifications. Basically adware.

have all notifications except friends turned off, continue to get notifications for pr0n and bots. App has gone downhill since they forced AI on everyone.

It predates August. Here is the same claim in July, from three different builds:

I turned off notifications, why are you still sending notifications? Fix the autoplay too. Garbage app. Literally malware at this point.

Unwanted notifications no matter what. I have turned off every possible setting, yet it still sends me them regarding people I couldnt care less about or sport stuff I have zero interest in.

been using this app over ten years and the updates are making this app less and less usable. I've tried adjusting the notification settings to just notify me when I get a message but it doesn't work. the amount of useless notifications Snapchat pumps out makes me ignore the app.

One reviewer from mid July describes the outcome that makes the claim testable rather than emotional: turning things off changed nothing measurable.

too many notifications. I turned off what I thought was enough, but the frequency of the same notification stayed the same as when I had all notifications on. annoying.

Claim Two: Types With No Off Switch

Thirty six reviewers say a particular kind of notification cannot be disabled, and they name it. The four names that recur are Spotlight, topic or hashtag chats, "Video for you" style recommendations, and typing indicators.

The topic chat notifications are the newest and the most specific. The phrase does not appear anywhere in our corpus before the 19 August build. After it, four reviewers use it.

I can't disable the new "check out X topic chat" notifications. I have nearly every notification turned off other than posts directly to me and these come through every day, sometimes twice, for no reason. What a garbage app.

quit with the daggum "topic chat" notifications. they're bypassing all of my notification settings, and I have absolutely zero craps to give about them

Unmutable notifications about some #Topic at least once a day. I've turned off all my notifications and they still show. You're a chat app, just send my messages. I don't want notifications I can't disable for some stupid feature I don't care about

Ever since 8/26 or so, this app keeps sending me garbage notifications about hashtags it thinks I might like. I do not. More troubling, there are no settings within the app to turn OFF these notifications.

The "Video for you" wording follows the same pattern. Zero mentions across every build from late June through early August, then four in August.

Stop sending me "Video for you" recommendations I have already disabled EVERY notification type from that app that isn't a message from someone, I am not using the video watching/social media aspects of snapchat and I never will I only use it to text some people

the new "video for you" notifications need to stop. I don't want to see them and I never turned them on. I can't even find where to turn them off so I just turned off all my Snapchat notifications until its fixed

Four mentions and three mentions are small numbers and we are not dressing them up. What makes them worth reporting is that they are zero before a date and non zero after it, in a corpus of 1,672 substantial negative reviews, which is the only kind of evidence a review set can give you about when something started.

Typing indicators are the oldest complaint in this group and the one with the clearest ask:

Worst messenger ever. Typing notifications are pure evil and cannot be disabled. Turning off vibrations is not working. Chat itself is bad, cannot read history if someone types you.

Would be higher but tired of the both a typing notification and a message received notification. You dont need both. At least give option to shut off typing notifications. Not to mention the notifications that are basically ads. Just too many ads in general.

And one reviewer describes finding an image in the notification drawer that arrived through a channel they had no control over:

I decided to drop the review for this app because it abuses notifications on Android and surfaces content equivalent to tabloids. Recently found an inappropriate image on my notifications drawer published through the "Public Channel".

Several reviewers describe the endpoint of all of this, which is the all or nothing choice: keep the app usable as a messenger, or silence it completely.

the constant friend suggestions and re-suggestions are irritating and not being able to single out different notifications settings sucks. you either get all notifications or none!

Notifications lets this app down. I only want to see when someone sends a snap. - Uninterested in if people are typing, liking, or reacting. This led me to disable notifications all together, and snapchat requests all the time to re-enable. Most videos are just slop.

Claim Three: The Toggle Does Not Stay Off

Eleven reviewers describe the settings changing back. This is the smallest of the three groups and the most serious, because if it is accurate it explains the other two.

They keep changing my notification settings to spam me with useless ad posts. I keep turning them off only for them to be magically enabled again every few months.

Edit: Years later, still giving it 1 star. It decided after years to change my notification preferences out of no where, and kept notifying me of things I didn't want. There's still no way to block snapchat as a user either so you're still subject to their spam.

This app is fundamentally evil. It's constantly begging me to turn on location, sync my contacts, and add people I don't know. The devs keep adding new annoying notifications that default to enabled.

Will activate any setting they add, including any of their 40+ notification settings. I have like 3 i care about and it's like I have to disable one new notification setting every single day. honestly, I dont even hardly use this.

Team Snapchat is now unblockable, the AI can't be gotten rid of, overall just kinda hate the app. Doesn't do any one thing particularly well. edit: keep creating notification categories and I'll keep blocking them, would give negative stars if I could

Note what the last two are actually describing. It is not necessarily a toggle flipping itself. It is that new notification categories keep being added, they arrive switched on, and the list is long enough that keeping up with it is a recurring chore. That is a different mechanism from the one the two August reviewers described, and both can be true.

What Actually Lands In The Tray

The settings argument is the part that can be checked. The part that makes people write one star reviews is the content.

Of the 152, 27 (17.8%) say the notifications are about people they do not know or follow, and 23 (15.1%) describe sexualised or suggestive material arriving in the notification drawer. Forty nine mention advertising. Twenty three name story alerts, seven name memories, seven name typing, eight name Spotlight.

Unskipable ads inbetween stories, constant notifications, slow android updates. edit. Now snap is pushing stories of OF girls / known pornstars on my push notifications. Almost naked women on my notifications, didn't ask for this, snap is just promoting these people unsolicited.

Too many notifications, constantly sending stories of OnlyFans fake girls thats completely irrelevant to me.

they keep sending me notifications of random people's stories that i can only describe as "goonbait". i have never clicked on these random notifications and ever since i started clicking "dismiss" on them, they started sending more sexually based ones.

The last of those points at something the reviewers keep raising: the feedback control does not appear to work either. Seven of the 152 mention pressing "Not interested" and getting more of the same.

Snapchat relies on excessively intrusive notifications. The "Not Interested" feedback button is ineffective, as the same unwanted alerts repeatedly reappear regardless of user input.

Fourteen describe the same notification repeating after being cleared, or a notification with nothing behind it.

I only use this app to keep in contact with a few friends or I'd delete it. When they send you a notification and you clear it from the screen they will send you the same notification sometimes 4 or 5 times just to annoy you.

snapchat is like a virus. non-stop notifications. You have to try blocking the dang notifications for them to stop, and yet they still find a way to intrude. There is no freaking reason for an app to keep sending the same notification.

Thirteen say they gave up and killed notifications entirely, which for a messaging app is the same as uninstalling it slowly.

The International Reviews Say The Same Thing Across 14 Storefronts

We ran the same read across 45 Google Play storefronts. After removing the records that are byte for byte identical to the American ones, 567 substantial negative reviews remain and 31 of them, 5.5%, are notification complaints. Twenty two are one star, and all 31 come from non English language storefronts, spread across 14 of them. A storefront is not a country and not a language, and a handful of these reviewers write in English from a non English store, so read the split as a rough one.

The claim survives translation intact. Portuguese:

Portuguese

a gente bloqueia notificações e elas voltam!!! e são muitas!!! é muito chato. sem contar que agora tem uma parte de ver vídeos e fotos de estranhos e só tem coisas muito estranhas, credo... jja desinstalei o meu e dasimhas filhas

Polish, twice, from two different reviewers:

Polish

Od dłuższego czasu używam sporadycznie. Regularnie wyświetlane są powiadomienia zapraszające/przypominające mimo, że co jakiś czas je wyłączam.

Polish

spoko ale jak robisz zdjęcie to dajecie na story a poza tym prawie wszystko płatne i tp i cągle dostajesz powiadomienia nawet jak dasz opcje nie pokazuj powiadomień

French:

French

Ça va de réactiver les notifications que j'ai désactivé ? Je m'en ballek de savoir que Vanessa que je ne connais pas est au ciné

Spanish, on the nag that follows you after you turn them off:

Spanish

la aplicación muy bueno pero satura con mucha notificación y cuando desactivas las notificaciones siempre aparece el cuadrito que pide que las actives

German, adding a detail that does not appear in the American set at all, which is that the reviewer believes the off switch is behind the paid tier:

German

Die App wird immer schlechter. Überall Werbung, ständig Benachrichtigungen über irgendwelche Influencer, die keinen Interessieren. Alle 5-10min gibt es Benachrichtigungen, die man NICHT ohne Snapchat+ deaktivieren kann.

And a Ukrainian reviewer supplies the most technically useful sentence in the entire international set, because it explains why the usual Android workaround fails:

Ukrainian

Я не розумію, якого хрена було робити цей спам сповіщеннями під обгорткою "розмов"? В системі не існує окремого каналу для вимкнення таких сповіщень, оскільки кожне сповіщення з'являється як нова розмова.

Two caveats. This is keyword matching, not the hand verification we did on the American set, so 5.5% is a ceiling rather than a floor. And the international window reaches back further than 66 days, so it is a longer and thinner record and cannot be compared to the August spike directly.

Step 1: Reopen The Notification List After Every Update

Do not assume the list you configured last month is the list that exists now. Multiple reviewers describe the same chore, which is that Snapchat keeps adding categories and the new ones arrive switched on. One counts more than forty separate toggles. Open the in-app notification settings and scroll the whole thing, not just the top.

Step 2: Verify The Toggle Actually Saved

This is the step that comes straight out of the two August reviews at the top of this article, and it costs ten seconds. Switch the setting off, leave the settings screen entirely, then come back and look at it again. If it is back on, no amount of further toggling will help and you should skip to Step 4.

Step 3: Turn Off The Named Types, Not Just The Category Headers

The types reviewers report as the loudest are Spotlight, story alerts from people you are not friends with, memories, topic and hashtag chats, and typing indicators. Several reviewers found that switching off a broad heading did not stop the specific alert they were getting, and that the individual entry had to be found and switched off on its own.

Step 4: Use Android's Own Per Channel Controls

Snapchat's settings live inside Snapchat. Android's notification channel controls sit outside it, in the system settings for the app, and they cannot be re-enabled by an app update. At least one reviewer in this set says explicitly that this is what finally worked.

The Ukrainian review quoted above is the important warning here. If a notification type arrives dressed as a new conversation, the system may create a fresh channel for each one, and blocking the channel you can see does not block the next one. Check the channel list again after a day.

Step 5: Do Not Rely On "Not Interested"

Seven reviewers report pressing it and getting more of the same content, and one reports the mix getting more sexual afterwards rather than less. Treat it as feedback into a recommendation system, not as a control. The controls are in Step 3 and Step 4.

What We Could Not Confirm

We did not test any of this. Everything above is what people wrote in public reviews, counted, dated and read by hand.

We cannot confirm that a toggle reverts when you leave the settings screen. Two reviewers describe it precisely and eleven describe settings changing back in some form, and that is all we have. We cannot confirm that any specific notification type genuinely lacks an off switch, only that thirty six people looked for one and did not find it. And we cannot tell you whether this is fixed, because our window ends on 3 September 2026 with the rate at 13.6% for the month, which is still more than double the July baseline.

The one thing the reviews do settle is that the complaint is not about volume. If it were, it would not have tripled in three weeks while the app kept shipping the same way it always has, and the reviewers would not keep listing which switches they already turned off.

Where To See The Reviews

You can read the current negative reviews yourself. We keep a running breakdown of the Snapchat Android app and the iOS listing, along with the trust check on whether Snapchat is legit, the parent guide on whether Snapchat is safe for kids, which is the relevant page if the material described above is landing on a child's phone, and a list of alternatives to Snapchat drawn from the same review data.

Related reading: FedEx App Notifications Not Working, What Users Say About App Data Collection, Social Media Apps Compared By Negative Reviews, Instagram vs TikTok: What The Negative Reviews Say and Is Yubo Legit and Safe?