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Push notification character limits on iOS, Android and web (2026)

Published 6 Nov 20265 min readAll posts

There is no official character limit for a push notification title or body on iOS or Android. The only hard cap is the size of the whole payload: 4 KB for a regular Apple notification and 4 KB for a Firebase data message. What people actually read is decided by screen width: about one line of title on both systems, up to four lines of body on iPhone and one line of body on a collapsed Android notification.

The payload limits and display rules below come from Apple’s and Google’s documentation, read on 6 November 2026. The “how many characters show” figures are our own measurements, and we say so wherever we use them.

The hard limits: payload size

Sources: Apple, Creating the remote notification payload¹; Firebase, About FCM messages².

The payload holds everything: title, body, custom data and keys. Apple’s servers refuse a notification that’s over the limit¹. In practice you’ll run out of screen long before you run out of bytes.

What people see on iPhone

Apple’s notification alert has three text fields: a title, an optional subtitle and the body. Apple’s design guidelines ask for a short title people can take in at a glance, and for succinct, complete sentences in the body. They also ask you not to cut the text yourself, because the system truncates it when needed³.

These figures are Truncly’s model of a 6.1-inch iPhone, not Apple numbers. Because iOS cuts by width, “about 40 characters” can be 25 wide letters or 50 narrow ones. People can long-press to read the rest, but most don’t.

Apple also notes that when someone hides previews in Settings, only your app icon and a generic title show³. Write body text that still makes sense if it’s the only thing someone sees later in Notification Center.

What people see on Android

Android’s documentation is direct: by default, notification text is truncated to fit one line⁴. To show more, the app has to use an expandable style such as BigTextStyle, which displays the long text in the expanded area⁵.

On a 360dp-wide phone, our model puts one line at roughly 35 average characters of body text. Most people never expand a notification, so treat the collapsed line as the whole message.

Web push in Chrome

Desktop browsers show web push in the operating system’s notification area, so the room you get depends on the OS. On a Mac, our measurements show about 43 characters of title and about 86 characters of body in Chrome notifications. These are Truncly measurements, not a Chrome specification.

iOS, Android and web side by side

All figures except the Android one-line rule are our own width-based measurements. The safe target for a message that works everywhere is a title under about 30 characters and a body whose first 35 characters carry the point.

Writing to these limits

These are our suggestions, not Apple or Google rules:

• Front-load the body. On Android the first line is all most people see.
• Don’t spend the title on your app name. Apple’s guidelines say to leave it out, since the system already shows your icon³.
• Test with real text, not character counts. “WWW” and “iii” take very different room.
• Keep private details out entirely. Apple warns you can’t know who else is looking at the screen when a notification arrives³.

You can paste a title or body into our free push notification checker to see where iOS and Android cut it.

Sources and credits

Payload limits and display rules are credited to Apple and Google and were read on 6 November 2026; on-screen character figures are Truncly’s measurements. Apple and iPhone are trademarks of Apple Inc. Android, Chrome and Firebase are trademarks of Google LLC. Truncly isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by Apple or Google.