Notifications

Your Messages on Game Night

A Recorded Game, a Dinner Out and a Walk Home

A message can give away a recorded game’s ending from the top of the screen, before anyone opens it.1 This is one of those nights, in Ingrid’s neighborhood.

  • Signal sets what its notifications say inside the app, apart from the phone’s own notification settings: the name and the message, the name only, or no name or message.1
  • Telegram has a Message Preview switch of its own, set separately for private chats, groups and channels.2
Ingrid at a restaurant table with two friends, talking and sharing food, a bag hanging from her chair

Ingrid records the basketball game and goes to dinner

The game starts at eight, and Ingrid has a dinner with two friends she will not move. She sets the game to record and asks them not to mention it. Over dessert she passes her phone across the table to show photos of her new flat, and a Signal message from her brother slides down over them: overtime, and he is losing his mind.

Ingrid walking along a city street at night under a streetlight, reading her phone

Ingrid checks the bus on the walk home

On the walk home Ingrid has her phone out, checking when the next bus comes. A message from her sister arrives in Telegram and sits across the top of the screen, every word of it: they won it in the last second. Ingrid has not opened Telegram, or asked anyone about the game.

Ingrid sitting in an armchair in front of a television at home, a patterned rug at her feet

Ingrid sits down with the recording anyway

At home the recording is waiting, all three hours of it. Ingrid writes back to her brother in Signal, asking him to keep the score to himself next time. Then she starts the game anyway, already knowing how it ends, and skips ahead to the last few minutes to see how it happened.

By eleven at night

Ingrid had taken the first line of a message across the top of the screen for something every phone shows. She had no idea Signal and Telegram each kept a setting of their own for what their notifications say, Signal’s under Notifications and Telegram’s under Notifications and Sounds.

True to you

What your phone does is up to you. We think so too. So we built TrueTo to make every app behave the way you do. That’s what true to you means.

TrueTo goes into each app and changes the setting the way you would. Every one of them is reversible, one at a time.

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Ingrid records the basketball game and goes to dinner

If Ingrid had used TrueTo, it would have gone into Signal and Telegram and turned off message previews in each for her.

Ingrid checks the bus on the walk home

With Message Preview off in Telegram, her sister’s notification would have come without its text, and the ending would have waited inside the chat.

Ingrid sits down with the recording anyway

The morning after, either setting would have been hers to change back, in its own app, with everything else left as it was.

Message Preview

In Signal, under Settings, Notifications and then Show, Ingrid can choose Name only herself.1 In Telegram, under Settings, Notifications and Sounds and then Private Chats, she can turn off Message Preview.2

Sources

  1. Signal, “In-App Notification Options,” Signal Support, read October 12, 2026.
  2. Makwana, Divyang, “How to disable message previews in Telegram [iPhone] [Android],” MobiGyaan, February 13, 2021.