Dismiss Notifications Instantly in iOS with a Swipe

iOS Notifications can be both extremely useful and persistently obnoxious, depending on what the alerts are for and when they come across your screen. For the times when they’re on the obnoxious end of the spectrum, in your way of doing something on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll be happy to discover that now in modern releases of the iOS system software you have a super-simple method of quickly dismissing notification alerts that you don’t want on the screen any longer.

All you need to do is swipe up on the notification to make it instantly go away.

Just swiping up on the alert when it appears at the top of the screen will make it disappear, dismissing the alert and taking it off the screen.

Hide Alert Notifications from iPhone or iPad Screen with a Swipe Up

Using the upward swiping gesture makes the notification banner disappear immediately, there is no longer a lengthy forced delay before it rolls off the top of the screen.

You’ve probably already noticed this, but if you do decide to leave it alone, the normal delay will make the notification go away eventually as usual, but that can take a few seconds.

Regardless of whether you dismiss a notification with the gesture or let it go away on it’s own, you’ll find them all accessible as usual in Notification Center, which can be accessed anytime and from anywhere with a swipe down gesture from the very top of the screen.

This is one of several new gestures that have been introduced to iOS with the release of 7.0, perhaps the most significant being a similar upward swipe to quit apps from the multitasking screen. Those gestures remain in modern versions as well.