Why Deliver Quietly Vanished From Your iPhone
Deliver Quietly is gone from the iPhone, but the feature is not. Apple renamed it Mute.
The gesture still starts the same way. Swipe left on a notification, then tap Options, and you can mute that app’s notifications for an hour or for a day.
The button you are hunting for used to say Manage. It now says Options. That one word is why so many people think the feature vanished.
This is not new, which is part of the confusion. Deliver Quietly left Apple’s documentation back in iOS 15, in 2021. The articles telling you where to find it never got updated, so people are still hunting for a button that has been gone for five years.
Here is what it does now, and how it differs from the three other ways to quiet an app.
What did Deliver Quietly actually do?
It let you silence one app’s notifications without silencing everything.
Apple introduced it in iOS 12. Your email could arrive with no sound while your messages still buzzed.
The idea survived. Only the name changed, and the current name describes it better.
Where is Deliver Quietly on iPhone now?
It is Mute, and you reach it from the notification itself.
- Find the notification. It can be on your Lock Screen or in Notification Center, which you open by swiping down from the top left of the screen.
- Swipe left on the notification, or on the stack of notifications from that app.
- Tap Options.
- Tap the option to mute for an hour, or the option to mute for the day.
To undo it, swipe left on a notification from that app in Notification Center, tap Options, then tap Unmute.
The same Options menu also holds Turn Off, which stops that app’s notifications entirely, and View Settings, which jumps you into that app’s notification settings.
What does Mute do to a notification?
Apple’s own description is specific, and it is worth reading closely.
Muting “sends them directly to Notification Center and prevents them from appearing on the Lock Screen, playing a sound, lighting up the screen, or presenting a banner.”
So the notification still arrives. It just waits quietly in Notification Center until you go looking.
| What happens | With Mute on |
|---|---|
| Appears in Notification Center | Yes |
| Appears on the Lock Screen | No |
| Plays a sound | No |
| Shows a banner | No |
| Lights up the screen | No |
One honest gap. Apple does not say whether the red badge on the app icon still appears, so we are not going to tell you either way. Check your own Home Screen after you mute something.
This is also where our old version of this article had it backwards. It claimed Deliver Quietly no longer appeared in Notification Center. Notification Center is exactly where muted notifications go, and always was.
Mute, Turn Off, or Scheduled Summary?
There are four ways to quiet an app, and picking the wrong one is why people end up missing things they wanted.
| Method | Where | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Mute for an hour or a day | Swipe left on the notification, tap Options | Silent, still in Notification Center, wears off on its own |
| Turn Off | Swipe left, tap Options, tap Turn Off. Or Settings, Notifications, the app, then switch off Allow Notifications | Nothing arrives at all, until you turn it back on |
| Scheduled Summary | Settings, Notifications, Scheduled Summary | Batched up and delivered at times you pick |
| Focus | Settings, Focus | Silences broadly by situation, not app by app from a notification |
Mute is temporary and forgiving. It expires by itself, so you cannot accidentally silence an app for six months.
Turn Off is permanent until you undo it. That is the one people choose by accident and then wonder why they missed a delivery.
Scheduled Summary is the underrated one. Instead of never seeing an app’s notifications, you see all of them at 8am and 6pm, ordered by what matters.
How do you set up a Scheduled Summary?
If Mute keeps expiring and you want something permanent that still lets things through, this is the setting.
- Open Settings and tap Notifications.
- Tap Scheduled Summary.
- Turn on Scheduled Summary.
- Set the time you want your summary to arrive. Tap Add Summary if you want more than one a day.
- Tap A to Z under Apps in Summary, then switch on the apps you want batched.
An app has to have Allow Notifications turned on to show up in that list. If an app is missing, that is why.
What can you change per app?
Go to Settings, tap Notifications, then tap the app. The controls that matter live there.
- Allow Notifications. The master switch for that app.
- Alerts. Choose where they show up: Lock Screen, Notification Center, or Banner at the top of the screen. You can pick any combination.
- Show Previews. Always, When Unlocked, or Never. Set this to When Unlocked if you do not want message content visible on your Lock Screen.
- Sounds. On or off.
- Notification Style. This is where you choose immediate delivery or hold the app’s notifications for your Scheduled Summary.
Turning off Sounds and unchecking Lock Screen and Banners gets you most of the way to a permanent Mute for that app.
Announce Notifications is a separate thing and lives somewhere else. It is under Settings, then Siri (or Apple Intelligence & Siri, depending on your device), then Announce Notifications.
What is new for notifications in current iOS?
A few things worth knowing if you are trying to cut noise.
Apple Intelligence can summarize long or stacked notifications so a pile of messages becomes one line. That arrived back in iOS 18.1, and notification prioritizing came in 18.4, so both are older than they feel.
Focus gained Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing, which lets notifications it judges important interrupt you and silences the rest.
Messages from unknown senders get filtered through Screen Unknown Senders, which you turn on in Messages under Manage Filtering. The Phone app added Call Screening and Hold Assist.
You can also change how notifications stack. Pick Count, Stack, or List under Display As in Settings, then Notifications, and pinch on the Lock Screen to expand or collapse what is already on screen.
Frequently asked questions
Why can’t I find Deliver Quietly anymore?
Because the name is gone. Apple folded it into Mute, and the button on the notification changed from Manage to Options. The function is still there.
What happened to Deliver Prominently?
Apple no longer documents that label. The way to reverse a muted app is Unmute, in the same Options menu you used to mute it.
Does Mute stop the notification from arriving?
No. It arrives and goes to Notification Center with no sound, no banner, and nothing on the Lock Screen. Use Turn Off if you want it to not arrive at all.
How long does Mute last?
An hour or the rest of the day, whichever you pick. It expires on its own, which is what makes it safer than turning notifications off.
Is Mute the same as Do Not Disturb?
No. Mute is one app. Do Not Disturb is a Focus that quiets everything based on what you are doing, and you set it up under Settings, then Focus.
If notifications are the problem on your iPad rather than your iPhone, the same menus apply, and our guide on turning off text messaging on an iPad covers the Messages side of it.
For quieting a specific person rather than a whole app, see how to block a number on iPhone. If your alerts are missing entirely rather than arriving silently, start with our fixes for an iPhone not getting verification texts.
And if a call failed rather than a notification, our explainer on what User Busy really means clears up a message that fools a lot of people. Tired of the animations too? Here is how to turn off iPhone message effects.