How can you disable the iOS Notification Center within your App?

It has been my experience that fullscreen apps (statusBarHidden = YES) have a slightly different notification center behavior by default: Swiping down over the area previously occupied by the status bar will only show a little tab. Only swiping the tab will then show the notification center. This has been enough to prevent accidental activation for me so far.

Currently, there is no public API for manipulating the behavior of the notification center. I am of the opinion that it's not likely that an app will ever be able to block a notification's appearance, and only slightly less unlikely that an app would be able to prevent the notification center from appearing. iOS is all about a consistent user experience experience at the price of developer freedom. I could see being frustrated by this kind of functionality if I were an unexpecting user.

All that said, there is always the dark-side of undocumented APIs. I would not be surprised if you could pull off some cleverness using those on a jailbroken device, but that's not my cup-o'-tea.

I just now figured this out. I am developing a game that runs in landscape and whenever I touched the left side, the notification center tab would appear. To fix this, you want to add the following:

setStatusBarOrientation:UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeLeft

I added this right after I setStatusBarHidden and I no longer have the problem of the notification tab.

Hope that helps.

An API was introduced in iOS 11, alongside a change in behavior to how Notification Center (and Control Center) is presented, to allow you to specify the desired behavior.

UIViewController.preferredScreenEdgesDeferringSystemGestures

In iOS 11+, Notification Center will always pull down when swiping from the very top of the screen, even if the status bar is hidden. preferredScreenEdgesDeferringSystemGestures allows you to specify that swiping a screen edge should not trigger the standard system UI, and instead it will provide a pull-out tab that the user must swipe again to bring out the system UI.

This is intended to be used for games where users swipe frequently, where it would be undesired to bring in system UI instead of control the game. For an immersive app like that, you can return .all to specify you don't want any system UI to appear the first time you swipe any edges of the screen, and it should instead prefer your app's own gestures.

Note that this will disable the ability to swipe once from the bottom to close an app on iPhones and iPads that don't have home buttons - the user will have to swipe twice to close the app.

There is still no way to completely disable Notification Center from within your app, nor prevent notifications from appearing while your app is in the foreground.