A modern phone is a noisy houseguest. It pings for a game they've never opened, flashes red badges that read as something is wrong, announces a software update in the middle of the night, and lets an unknown number ring at dinner. For someone who's a little anxious about the phone already, that constant clamour does real harm: it teaches them either to jump at every buzz, or — more often — to stop trusting the phone altogether and leave it face-down, unanswered, when it's their daughter calling.
The good news is that almost all of that noise is optional. You can turn a shouting phone back into a quiet one in a few minutes, and leave only the alerts that actually earn their place.
What's usually worth keeping
Keep it short. For most people the list is really just:
- Calls from anyone in their contacts.
- Text messages from the handful of people they know.
- Perhaps a calendar or reminder you've set together.
Almost everything else can go quiet without anyone missing it.
What to switch off
- App notifications they don't use — games, shopping, news, social apps, "tips about your phone". Turn them off one by one; nothing breaks.
- Badges — the little red numbers on icons. They read as an accusation to someone who's uneasy, and they're rarely useful.
- Automatic updates that pop up or rearrange things. Set updates to happen quietly, or check them yourself now and then, so the phone doesn't reinvent itself overnight.
- Sounds and vibrations for anything that isn't a call or text. On both Android and iPhone you can do this notification by notification, or lean on Do Not Disturb / Focus for quiet hours.
On Android, it's under Settings → Notifications (and each app's own settings). On iPhone, it's Settings → Notifications, with Focus for quiet times. You don't need to get every switch perfect — turning off the noisiest handful transforms the feel of the phone.
About scam and spam texts
A word, carefully. You can reduce junk and scam texts — report them (in the UK, forward suspicious texts to 7726), block the sender, and turn on your network's spam filtering — and that genuinely cuts the flow. But no setting stops all of it, and a determined scam can still land. So the honest approach is two-sided: quieten what you can, and have the gentle conversation that the bank will never text asking them to move money, and that it's always fine to put the phone down and ring you instead. Fewer nasty surprises, plus a calm way to check — not a promise of a scam-proof phone, because there's no such thing.
When you'd rather start clean
If wrangling switches feels endless, the other route is a screen that's quiet by design. My Phone is a free screen of big, fixed buttons you add to the phone they already own — no badges, no pop-ups, no stream of alerts, just the people they call and a few everyday things. And our step-by-step guide to simplifying the phone they already own covers the settings above in order.
A calm phone isn't a switched-off one. It's a phone that only speaks up when it's worth speaking up — so that when it does ring, they trust it enough to answer.