What - DoNotNotify is an app that logs all incoming notifications, and displays them grouped by app. It also captures the action behind the notification, which can be triggered from the app itself. From this log, you can create rules to whitelist/blacklist notifications from apps depending on their notification content. These filters can even be regex expressions, which allows for more complicated use-cases. The app ships with some pre-defined rules for popular apps like Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, Netflix, TikTok, Reddit etc.
Where - The website is at https://donotnotify.com/.
Would also like to call out that the app runs purely on your device, never communicates with anything on the Internet, and only requires notifications access to work. It is completely free, and there is no advertising or hidden gotchas.
I would donate/pay for this if it was open source on F-Droid.
Kudos to you for building it. I put off building this exact same application so many times it's not even funny. Too bad I'm too lazy to maintain something like this.
The app lacks the INTERNET permission so it can't really exfiltrate data even if it wanted to.
Moreover an app without internet permission can still send data out using "INTENTS" for other apps in Android. This can make an app dangerous even without internet permission.
I was excited about the application and was dissapointed to see that it was closed source. I will absolutely not trust anyone that I cannot sue with this data. Big companies at least follow some standards that are enforced by multiple governments here we know nothing.
but it could prepare a tidy little package for something else to grab later.
Another person requested that the app be open-sourced as well. I will look into that.
Just makes me sleep a little better.
Mobile apps are a cesspool of user-hostile behavior, and I have a strong preference for not giving closed source apps access to sensitive data.
I don't understand why not release the source if the app is completely free, what are you trying to protect?
so congrats to the author of this. I do agree that I'd prefer it open sourced too, it feels a bit risky it having access to all your notifications.
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.example.notificationalerter
App1 abuses notification permission
App2 keeps App1 in check
App3 to keep App2 from abusing network permission
...
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/android/obtaining-apps/#f-d...
IDK if I would consider not blindly trusting an unknown third party to read all my notifications being paranoid, but if it is, then yeah, I guess I am.
I've used F-droid merely due to the open source guarantee, so how fast these apps are patched isn't a deal-breaker for me, but I'll definitely look into Obtanium now.
Thank you!
IMO this needs to be an app guideline enforced by the iOS App Store and Play Store. I remember back in the day, iOS used to be known for having less spammy notifications.
If any app abuses the notifications at all I turn them all off, that's the only way to stop it. If the notifications are required for the app's operation, well, then I have to delete the app.
Society has fucked itself over allowing these to exist.
Yeah, but... money.
And every evening or so I sit down on my computer and check WhatsApp notifications on web.whatsapp.com to catch up with what's going on in groups people added me to. I find this quite good for my well-being.
Another founder friend lives in a different mid-sized community and was using MyGate. He got pissed not just at the ads but at the massive data gathering—contacts, camera, flashlight, and everything. He ended up creating https://dobermanapp.com
Nowadays I'd probably use a tool like yours. My partner is going through legitimate withdrawal symptoms after two years of short-form content addiction. Turning off all notifications was one of the first things I did for them.
Turning the phone on silent isn't really a solution since it still pollutes the screen (and the history) with useless notifications.
Gate access isn't absolutely need, your visitors can call you. Or if you order food you can check status on the food app.
Luckily on Android you can use Tasker and the AutoNotification plugin to block specific notifications that bug you. And I guess this app is now another alternative. I don't know how iOS people live without the ability to do this. My wife, who uses iOS, is constantly complaining about annoying notifications and there's nothing I can do to help her.
I’m on iOS and as soon as an app sends me a spammy notification I just go into settings and turn off notifications for it. Though honestly most of the time I just don’t allow notifications in the first place.
They proudly advertise:
"Capture the attention of India’s most sought-after communities"
https://mygate.com/ad-platform/"
Faszinating, literal vendor lock in. I know that moving places suck (I am just doing it), but this would be unacceptable for me.
> 47% DAU:MAU
> Build strong brand recall with high frequency on our daily-use app
Spamming notifications is how they are getting these high frequency users.
I'm currently using BuzzKill[1] for managing notifications on android. It's so good (and beautiful) that even though I use iPhone as primary device, I receive most of my notifications on android and relay it to my iPhone using a Termux script[2] after putting it through BuzzKill.
I understand that your USP is logging which BuzzKill also provides with numerous actions and Tasker integration on top of it.
It's great that DoNotNotify is free, but if any android app deserves to be paid for its BuzzKill. Perhaps being open-source could be a better differentiator for DoNotNotify?
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston....
[2] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/apple-watch-with-android/t...
One thing I've always wanted is the ability to "group" notifications.
Apps like WhatsApp can be really bad for pinging lots of times within a minute for individual messages. I really don't need my phone to buzz more than once every five minutes, and wish I could set rules like "don't buzz for x minutes after a notification".
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-15-notification-coo...
For an app like Google Maps though, I completely turned off notifications because there's really no need for me to have them. If you go into the notification settings through the Google Maps app, it's a big shitshow because it has some 40 categories that you will have to manually manage and I'm sure this was designed for the very purpose of letting users become tired after looking at them and then leave things as is.
Similarly, I do think the vast majority of the apps that we use don't need to send us any notifications at all. Thanks to Android for adding this feature to block all notifications from apps some four years ago, I guess.
The enormity of the garbage spam they get from phone app notifications and text messages is breathtaking.
A feature that would make this app useful to me is a notification digest as a third option in addition to allow and deny. The digest would hold certain notifications and show them to me all at once on a schedule I set.
For a concrete use case, I have low-priority group chats and high-priority direct messages in the same messaging app. I want the direct messages to interrupt me at any time, and I want to be told I have unread group chats a couple times a day without having to poll them manually.
1) Ads - these should not exist, really, or at worst should be flagged in the app store as an anti-feature isolateable from other notifications.
2) "Recommendations" - that is, stuff you didn't subscribe to but are things the app offers that they "think you would like". These are defensible but should never ever be mixed with...
3) Stuff I actually explicitly subscribed to.
Breaking these rules should be rejection from the app store. Especially now that Google is legally required to allow 3rd-party app stores, they have much greater grounds to properly curate the Play Store. Let the filth live on 3rd-party stores.
> I live in a gated society that uses an app called MyGate to allow visitors, and the app intentionally pushes ads through the same channels since you cannot block them.
This strikes me as against the Play Store policy, potentially Notifications VX-S1, "Notifications are not used for cross-promotion or advertising another product, as this is strictly prohibited by the Play Store."
Worth a try to report them.
You can't turn these off without never getting FB Messenger messages or notices of if your food has arrived because no one knows how to ring a fucking doorbell anymore even if the note specifically says to :/
Anecdotally, I've never received anything other than those notifications.
I only use Facebook Messenger for Facebook Marketplace, so I don't have much interaction with it, but I see "Reminders" as a category of notification, try turning that off.
Honestly that's a little out my league. The idea did occur to me, but I'm discouraged by the amount of compute required for most ML.
> Also curious about battery impact — how often does it process the notification stream?
The OS sends any new notification to the app (it is a push based approach) automatically. On my own phone, this app currently shows at the bottom of the list in battery usage (<1%).
also, I bet that Android platform forbids you from requesting the internet permission if you use some "dangerous" permissions, e.g. reading notifications.
EDIT: added link.
[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston....
The remaining notifications are _still_ frequent enough that no single app can expect to get my attention with a single buzz.
It's not like apps don't upsell to when I _open_ them and have to swipe away ads before I can use them. So why give them another channel?
25-years ago me is going to roll his eyes so hard, but you know where I don't mind slightly-targeted ads? My email & my doormat. Send me a catalogue, I love a catalogue.
I have exactly the same policy. But in my case I am forced to keep notifications enabled from apps like MyGate (since nobody would be able to visit me without it) and I have no say in the matter - my gated society uses it and my only way out is to pay for the app itself.
I am stuck similarly with the ClassDojo app that my kids school uses to communicate with parents. The notifications are just "You have a new notification!" which leads to a slow app load, an upsell splash, before finally having to scroll to find the important message from a teacher. In this case though, paying would not make it any less slow to use.
I just check once a week instead, and the parents WhatsApp group fills in the gaps for me.
But I also have apps that push marketing through notifications _and_ are urgent on a reoccurring basis (usually delivery or rideshare apps). For those, I'd love if there was a system notification setting (per app) for "allow notifications from this all for the next X hours" _and_ a simple UX to make that happen.
There are certain apps that I would love to be able to uninstall but have to keep for one reason or another, so I really appreciate apps like these which prevent attention-stealing notifications from making it through :)
If I go a few days without going into a given social media app to see the notifications in the app, so be it. For that matter, I'm relatively selective about the apps I even install in the first place.
Some apps use just one channel and use it to send both really important stuff (like fraud alerts on your credit card) as well as ads so you cannot turn them off even if you wanted to.
Other apps create 4 new channels a week so you cannot turn them off even if you wanted to.
Apps shouldn't be allowed to send notifications for Ads! I give any app on my phone one chance to be annoying and then turn them off.
This feels like something where we should be able to use an on device classifier or even LLM to bucket notifications, similar to a spam inbox.
Even better if they can pull any potential coupons out for use later without flavor text from the notification itself.
Also, do note that if it is a persistent notification[1] then the Android OS does not allow it to be dismissed. In such a case, you will see the notification in the blocked history with a warning icon next to it.
[1] https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/notifications...
Also, can Google read push notifications going through FCM?
I hope that Apple does a better job of this too! I don't want Uber's ad notifications, but I do want their notifications about my vehicle status.
