The short answer
The quiet windows are 07:00, 21:00, 22:00. Those are the waking hours when American news apps push least. An alert at 22:00 meets roughly 54% of the competition it would meet at the peak.
The rush hour is 12:00, when 6.7% of the day's alerts land. Push then to ride the habit, or avoid it so you are not the fourth buzz in ten minutes.
Weekends are different. Volume drops 27%, and the peak moves to 12:00 on both weekend days.
One honest caveat before the charts. This data measures competition, not attention: it is when 53 American news apps chose to push over twelve months (64,919 notifications), not when readers open them. The quiet windows are where your alert stands alone on the lock screen; whether readers are looking at that moment is something your own open rates have to answer. Together, the two tell you when a push is both seen and unchallenged.
Hour by hour, every weekday
Each chart is one weekday on United States's local clock, scaled to its own busiest hour. Red is the day's peak; green marks the quiet windows from the answer above.
Share of United States notifications by local hour, per weekday, Aug 2025 to Jul 2026. An average weekday carries about 193 pushes and a weekend day about 141.
How to read this
- To be seen first, use the green hours. A push at 22:00 is often the only news on the lock screen. If your story can wait twenty minutes, waiting out the rush is free reach.
- To set the agenda, beat the peak by a few minutes. The 12:00 spike is when American push desks fire their planned alerts. Landing just before it means you are the story the rush reacts to.
- Weekends reward different timing. Saturday peaks at 12:00 and Sunday at 12:00, so a weekday schedule copied onto the weekend still works, unusually for this dataset.
- Breaking news ignores all of this. These patterns are the editorial baseline of planned pushes. When a story actually breaks, everyone pushes at once regardless of the clock; the question becomes who is first, and that is measured in minutes.
Method
Counted: 64,919 push notifications sent by 53 American news apps between 1 August 2025 and 31 July 2026, recorded by AO.news's capture phones as they landed and stamped in America/New_York local time (daylight saving handled per timestamp). Front-page robot headlines are excluded. Quiet windows are the three waking hours (07:00 to 22:00) with the lowest share of pushes across the whole year. Competition is measured across apps; your own audience's attention curve may differ. Full dataset and cross-country comparison: A year of push notifications. Other countries: the index.