Can Windows Push Notification Services (WNS) be disabled?

Question

There is no push notification service listed in the services list. Presumably WNS is a core Windows component.

Regular Microsoft-Windows-PushNotifications-Platform event log entries are being generated. After some research (e.g. blog about WNS) it appears that these "services" are related to Windows App Store application and live tiles updates. No article I've found mentions disabling WNS.

It is possible to completely disable WNS (e.g. using the registry)?

Solution 1

There are a variety of Group Policy registry settings that can be used to disable push notifications. See these articles for Windows 8.1 and for Windows 10.

See below for the registry settings you need to disable tile and other push notification updates. Copy this into a new .reg file, then double-click the file to add them to the registry. You will need to reboot afterwards.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\PushNotifications]
"NoToastApplicationNotification"=dword:00000001
"NoCloudApplicationNotification"=dword:00000001
"NoTileApplicationNotification"=dword:00000001

Solution 2

User services (those ending w/ an underscore followed by a hex number) can be disabled and reenabled through the registry. E.g. in a script (as admin):

reg add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\WpnUserService" /v "Start" /t REG_DWORD /d "4" /f

A reboot (as Microsoft's universal "solution") is also needed. (maybe a logout is also enough -- haven't tested it)

Comments

[AlainD]

I found this extensive collections of Group Policyarticles on MSDN: getadmx.com/?Category=Windows_8.1_2012R2 (Windows 8.1) and getadmx.com/?Category=Windows_10_2016 (Windows 10). In particular, the Turn off notifications network usage article looks interesting. I've implemented this policy and will report back.