You Can Now Disable The Annoying App Optimization Notification On The S5 After An Update

April 04 12:58 2016 by Alexei Rivera Print This Article

This does not necessarily affect a lot of people – heck it affects a subset of people who use a particular phone / brand / model – but its also very annoying and if you search for it online you’ll see a lot of people complaining about it. For the past several months since the Lollipop update to the Samsung Galaxy S5 – and from what we can tell most of the 2015 flagships like the Galaxy S6 – there’s been a persistent and annoying notification that pops up on your tray repetitively without warning. We got it nearly twice a day and we nearly pulled our hair out trying to disable it. As typical with bloatware crap from Samsung, you can’t uninstall the app, turn off notifications, or even disable it. Leaving you with no recourse but to get interrupted by constant useless notifications day in day out, even as you sleep. Keen observers will then realize that if you dig into the menus you can go into App Optimization settings and completely disable the feature – a setting which unfortunately will burn more battery life in the long run. Fortunately, after a recent update to our S5 (not Marshmallow yet), an option has now been added to block these notifications.

The update is about 280MB in size and mentions nothing except the standard stability improvements, enhanced features, and other nondescript stuff. Yeah, useful verbiage we know!

The phone will then be brought up to Security Patch 2016-03-01 and the build you see in the screenshot above.

And then when we got the annoying App Optimization popup and went to drill into the app to disable the annoying feature, we were surprised to find a button to “Block notifications”. Congrats Samsung, for several months you idiots let us use a phone that constantly gave us useless notifications that made us swear never to buy your phones ever again. Do you even use these things? Because someone in your company might have at least gotten annoyed at these useless popups, right?

Don’t really know whether to thank Samsung for allowing us to remove this crap on our notifications or to hate them for having it on there in the first place. To be honest, we’re leaning towards the latter.