Fear not, you can cut down on the number of QuizUp notifications without uninstalling the game altogether
The day has finally come when the folks on Android can get in on the QuizUp craze, and we’re quickly finding out that the game is both fun and extremely annoying with notifications. Being a social game, QuizUp strongly encourages the use of Facebook or Google+ login along with Google Play Games, which has the upside of getting you playing with your friends and the downside of notifying you about every. single. game.
Luckily after a bugfix update the app should at least now obey your setting selections, so you now have a few options to make QuizUp a little less bothersome in your notification bar. There’s the semi-annoying step of simply removing your Facebook or Google+ account from the game, and of course the nuclear option of blocking QuizUp notifications at the system level. Hit the break and see the process — you may just be able to keep this fun game installed after all.
Use those settings toggles
You can mitigate a lot of the actionable and annoying notifications from QuizUp by simply heading into the settings area and toggling them off. Open up the app, slide in the drawer on the right side and hit “Settings” down at the bottom. You can then toggle off the Challenge, Chat and Follower notifications — if you want to know exactly when someone challenges you to a game you can probably leave “Challenge” on, but Chat and Follower probably aren’t worth getting spammed over. If you want to go a step further, just hit the “Privacy Mode” toggle and you will automatically block communication from non-friends.
Pro tip: while you’re in the settings, you may want to visit the “General” section and turn off the endlessly-looping background music.
Manage your social networks
Considering that other types of notifications (covered above) are easy to turn off, the most annoying of the bunch is the flood of “Phil just joined QuizUp!” notifications that pile in at the rate of about 50 per hour (at least for us). You can peg the blame on this one to signing in with your social account and/or connecting to Google Play Games. The system knows you have the game installed, knows your friends, and knows that your friends have the game installed — seems like enough reason for it to fill up your notification shade with information about that, apparently.
Unfortunately at this time the only sure-fire remedy seems to be to disconnect your social accounts from the game. You can head into the settings and log out completely, then sign back in and (unfortunately) start over with just your email address. You can always add your social accounts later if QuizUp decides to give you some control over these friend-joining-the-game notifications, but until then you can start fresh and not be bothered by them. We expect the flood of people joining the game to be over in a few weeks so you’ll get fewer of these notifications, but it’ll take an app update to resolve it completely.
Block every notification outright
As we said earlier, there is the “nuclear option.” Say you’ve already hit level 15 and are a Smartypants at General Knowledge, so maybe you don’t want to wipe the slate clean and start over with an email log-in. There is another way.
If you have a device running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean or later, you can block QuizUp from sending notifications to your phone altogether at the system level. Simply long press on a QuizUp notification and hit “App info” or head into your phone’s settings and find the QuizUp entry in the app list. You can then uncheck the “Show notifications” option and your phone won’t show anything from the app again.
You’ll have to enter the app manually to keep up on everything, as the games, requests and chats are still coming into the app, but that may be exactly what you were looking for. With just a few tweaks, you can weather the notification storm and keep dominating your favorite topics on QuizUp.