Short answer: for the notifications you actually see, no. A message alert is sent by the app's server through Apple's push service to your phone, and the system shows the banner. Nothing in that path asks whether the app is allowed to refresh in the background. Turn Background App Refresh off for a messaging app and the alerts keep arriving.
There is one real exception, and it is narrower than the fear: silent background pushes, the kind that wake an app to fetch content without showing anything. That path does depend on the app being allowed to work in the background. Most messaging apps do not deliver their alerts that way, but some use it to keep content current, and those will behave differently with the switch off.
Two different push deliveries
It helps to separate what arrives from what is displayed, because "notification" covers both:
| Visible alert push | Silent background push | |
|---|---|---|
| What the user sees | A banner, a sound, a badge on the lock screen | Nothing at all |
| What it is for | Telling you something happened | Waking the app so it can fetch content quietly |
| Who displays it | The system, on Apple's push service | The app, in the background, if it is allowed to run |
| Depends on Background App Refresh? | No | Yes |
The right-hand column is the only place where this setting and notifications meet. An app that wants to update its content silently needs the background wake-up; an app that only wants to tell you a message arrived does not.
That is why the honest answer to "will turning it off stop my notifications" is not for the alerts, and yes for the silent channel — and why the practical worry is smaller than the phrase "silent push" makes it sound. A silent push does not carry a message to show you. If it is suppressed, the app simply learns about the new content later, when you open it.
The one narrow way they do interact
There is a middle case worth knowing, because it is where real annoyance comes from. Some apps use a silent background push to fetch a message and then ask the system to display a local notification for it. When that is the design, turning off Background App Refresh removes the wake-up the whole chain depends on, and alerts can become late or stop until you open the app.
You cannot tell from the outside which design an app uses. The observable symptoms do differ, though:
- Alerts arrive instantly, and the app content lags — this is normal with the switch off, and it is preloading being lost.
- Alerts themselves are late or missing for one specific app — that app may be using the silent-push path, so turning Background App Refresh back on for that one app is a reasonable test.
Two related things that get blamed on the switch but are separate: a notification that arrives with no thumbnail or preview attached usually means the app would have fetched that media in the background, so it appears when you open the app instead. And notification banners that appear without sound or without waking the screen are settings inside Settings → Notifications, not this switch.
How to test it on your own phone
You need one app and one alert, and about a minute:
- Turn Background App Refresh off for a single app only — leave the master switch on, and change nothing else.
- Lock the phone and have someone message you, with the app closed.
- Watch the lock screen. If the alert appears, alerts do not depend on this setting. That is the question answered, for that app.
- Leave the app closed for a few hours, then open it. If the content is behind what you would expect, that is the preloading you gave up, and it is the honest cost of the setting.
If the alert in step 3 does *not* appear, do not conclude anything yet — turn the switch back on and test again. That comparison, not the single result, is what tells you whether Background App Refresh was involved.
If notifications are actually missing, check in this order
Background App Refresh is near the bottom of the list of plausible causes, because it cannot suppress a visible alert. The order that actually finds the problem:
- Is the app allowed to notify you at all?
Settings → Notifications → [app]and check that Allow Notifications is on. This is the single most common cause and it takes ten seconds. - Is the alert being delivered quietly? On the same screen, look for Deliver Quietly, and check whether the app is being bundled into a scheduled Notification Summary, which holds non-urgent alerts for later.
- Is a Focus mode or Do Not Disturb active? Focus decides what reaches the lock screen and does not care about this switch.
- Is the app set to alert or banner style, with sound? A style of None shows it only in Notification Centre, which people read as "no notification".
- Are you in Low Power Mode? It pauses background refresh and background fetching, so content-dependent alerts can lag while it is on.
- Is it every app or one app? Every app points at Focus, Notification Summary or a system-wide issue; one app points at that app's settings or its server. If it is every app after a system update, the update-specific pages are the better starting point — see Notifications Not Arriving or Delayed and, if you have just updated, iOS 27 Notifications Not Showing and iOS 27 Notifications Delayed.
Notice that Background App Refresh does not appear in that list. It is not a plausible cause of a missing alert — only of content that is stale when you open an app, and of the narrow silent-push design described above.
What to do about it
The setting is safe to turn off for most apps, and the notification-related reason not to is limited and specific:
- Keep it on for apps whose alerts you have seen go late, and for messaging and email apps generally, if you want content prefetched. The cost is a small amount of background battery, covered in Background App Battery Use.
- Turn it off for everything else without worrying about alerts. The decision rule, per app, is in Which Apps Should Keep Background App Refresh On?.
- If you are chasing a real notification fault, start from the notification settings above and work down. The switch is not where those problems live, and changing it will make your phone slightly less convenient without fixing anything. If notification volume rather than delivery is the issue, Notification Overload: How to Fix It is the relevant page.
For what the switch does and does not control in general, see What Is Background App Refresh?; for the consequence list when you turn it off, see What Happens When You Turn Off Background App Refresh?.