I filled out a bracket on ESPN last week. By Thursday afternoon my phone had buzzed eleven times for games I wasn’t watching. Every time, I looked down, lost the paragraph I was reading, and took four minutes to find it again.
Quick answer: Android Notification Channels is a system feature that lets you silence specific types of notifications from an app while keeping others on. To filter ESPN alerts: open Settings, tap Apps, find and tap ESPN, tap Notifications, then toggle off channels like Score Updates or Breaking News while leaving Bracket Updates on. The controls live in your phone’s system settings, not inside the ESPN app itself, which is why almost no one finds them.
What’s happening
ESPN sends notifications for everything — every upset, every buzzer beater, every game you didn’t ask about. You just wanted to track your bracket. But every buzz pulls you out of whatever you were doing, and getting back takes longer than the notification itself.
Your phone can filter them
Android lets you turn off specific types of notifications per app. ESPN breaks its alerts into channels — score updates, breaking news, editorial, your bracket. You can disable the ones you don’t want and keep the ones you do.
How to do it
- Open Settings
- Tap Apps
- Find and tap ESPN
- Tap Notifications
- Toggle off the channels you don’t want (like Score Updates or Breaking News)
Keep Bracket Updates on. Turn everything else off.
Why you’ve never seen it
Android notification channels launched with Android 8.0 Oreo in 2017, but most users have never heard of them because the feature lives in system settings, not inside the apps that send the notifications. The path is Settings → Apps → [app name] → Notifications, which requires knowing to look for per-app notification controls in your phone’s settings rather than inside ESPN itself.
ESPN has its own in-app notification preferences, but they’re broad toggles that don’t always persist through app updates. The system-level controls override what the app wants to send, making them more reliable. Android also offers adjacent notification tools that most people never find: you can snooze a notification like an alarm to deal with it later, or check Notification History to recover an alert you accidentally swiped away. Three separate features, three separate locations, all solving notification problems most people assume can’t be solved.
The bigger picture
Android notification channels work on every app that implements them, not just ESPN. Instagram separates likes from DMs from live notifications. YouTube splits subscriptions from recommendations from comment replies. News apps break alerts into breaking news, daily digests, and personalized stories. The same Settings → Apps → [app] → Notifications path gives you per-category control over all of them.
The problem isn’t that Android lacks the controls. It’s that every app defines its own channel names, its own categories, and its own defaults. There’s no unified view of which apps are sending what. You’d have to go app by app through your entire phone to audit what’s on and what’s off — channels, history, snooze behavior, notification dots. You’ve meant to do that for months. TrueTo handles notification channel settings across apps so the noisy defaults are turned down in one pass instead of fifty, right now, before you move on to something else.
I changed ESPN’s notification channels during halftime of a game I wasn’t watching. Took about ninety seconds. That was two weeks ago and I haven’t lost a paragraph since.