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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...
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.
20 years ago the idea that I'd have to have an account with an american company so as to be able to interact with so much of my on-another-continent society would be ridiculous!
Now it is the default. It is sad.
Yeah, but... money.
I expect the bottom end of the market is also dependent on the official app stores to make money. What real alternatives do users have, especially with sideloading on Android now requiring Google bless your APK anyway? (edit: Looks like Google has started to walk this back slightly. Even still. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...)
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.
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.
Gate access isn't absolutely need, your visitors can call you. Or if you order food you can check status on the food app.
Turning the phone on silent isn't really a solution since it still pollutes the screen (and the history) with useless notifications.
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.
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 keep 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 enabling this feature some four years ago, I guess.
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
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.
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.
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...
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%).
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.
fwiw i completely agree that oss is the way to go here
* that the application is source-available;
* toolchain used to build the app is FOSS - application does not use Play Services, or proprietary tracking/analytics, or proprietary ad libraries.
* application toolchain doesn't depend on "binary blobs";
Not even passing the sniff test on those easy to meet requirements is suspicious.
The reason many apps stop showing ADs when their internet is blocked is because they need to make an API call to their own servers before running the AD. That is the common behavior but not mandatory
Confirmed these settings on One+15 on OOS16 (based on Android 16).
Is it also the case for other Android brands?
P.S. I did use it before to turn off ads.
Weirdly, my very old Nexus 6P with the WiFi off, could lie untouched for weeks, with almost no battery depletion. Yet if I turn the WiFi on with near stock Android (meaning no messengers, tens of email accounts, etc, to constantly ping _something_), it just eats the battery within 24 hours tops. Perhaps that’s just the module itself, but I remember flashing LineageOS and having better savings. I have no real numbers to support that right now, although I still have the phone lying around somewhere and could test this some day.
I've also noticed the difference between vendor+custom ROM with a Xiaomi device, which I use as a second phone around the house for controlling smart lights and such. The biggest difference there seems to be that I don't have as many apps installed and as many features enabled, because during active use and shortly after, the battery drains just as fast as (actually a bit faster than) when using the original ROM.
Many custom ROMs (at least the LineageOS-based ones) also don't do thing like configure the country code for the WiFi chip and GPS caches. A large part of the 5GHz spectrum simply doesn't exist (by default) on my custom ROM devices so there's just less to scan in the background.
None of the Samsungs I have owned so far had this feature and neither did my last Pixel.
Some Chinese/Taiwanese brands do it too, but most western brands don't seem to include a firewall.
1. App can't use mobile data in background
2. App can use mobile data in background except in Data Saver mode
3. App can use mobile data in background regardless of Data Saver mode
____
For anyone doing comparisons, the literal settings appear under "Mobile Data Usage" as:
* [X] Background Data ("Enable usage of mobile data in the background")
* [ ] Unrestricted mobile data usage ("Allow unrestricted mobile data access when Data Saver is on")
There are also (open source) firewall apps that will let you block (non-system) apps if you're on a stock ROM like me.
Technically, this is a permission, just not a user-grantable one. Google has moved quite a few permissions from inherent to user-grantable, but most apps don't work without internet (unfortunately) so I doubt they will do it for the internet permission in stock android.
Writing to a local server, and then uploading from the browser to bypass consent mechanisms.
https://wire.com/en/blog/metas-stealth-tracking-another-eu-w...
but it could prepare a tidy little package for something else to grab later.
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.
Another person requested that the app be open-sourced as well. I will look into that.
I don't understand why not release the source if the app is completely free, what are you trying to protect?
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.
Just makes me sleep a little better.
I might actually try this now.
Fast/private DNS, firewall, logs, VPN (WireGuard) ready to go.
App1 abuses notification permission
App2 keeps App1 in check
App3 to keep App2 from abusing network permission
...
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.example.notificationalerter
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!
We've seen the released bundles being different to the source code before too AFAIR, so whether it's a single repository or F-Droid, both can easily screw users up if compromised.
I don't want to be paranoid but the world's not making it easy.
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.
Also, can Google read push notifications going through FCM?
> 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 :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
The enormity of the garbage spam they get from phone app notifications and text messages is breathtaking.
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.
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....
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 :)
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.
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