Your Galaxy phone will soon know which notifications matter the most

Samsung is prepping for a significant step-up for its smartphones’ interface with the upcoming One UI 8.5 update. Ahead of the purported beta rollout starting late next month, we’ve already encountered nearly a dozen noticeable changes that could come to eligible Samsung phones and tablets with the update, including iOS-like summarization for notifications using AI. And now, we’re learning about another potential notification upgrade.

With One UI 8.5, Samsung may let you assign a higher priority to specific notifications, based on the feature added to a recently leaked One UI 8.5 build. As spotted by Sammyguru, the “Prioritize notification” option could be toggled on to set certain notifications as important.

According to the description, users will be able to designate high-priority notifications for each app in its settings. When you do so, notifications from these apps show higher up in the list, ensuring you don’t miss them.

The graphic accompanying the feature description shows a Galaxy AI logo, suggesting that AI may be at work while sorting these notifications. However, we can’t ascertain how that helps.

Notably, Apple introduced a similar means to show priority notifications on top of the stack with iOS 18.4. The feature uses Apple Intelligence to show notifications from important people in a separate group.

In Samsung’s case, the feature page doesn’t mention anything about prioritizing notifications from favorite contacts, though that would have been nice, regardless of the app, though that would have been useful. Secondly, it would be nice to have a mechanism to prevent high-priority notifications from getting cleared immediately when you tap the “Clear” button at the bottom.