Show HN: DoNotNotify – Log and intelligently block notifications on Android (donotnotify.com)

Tried with Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 to hide the VPN and DNS notification from Android System notification service but it does not work.

A couple years back I was looking for this sort of solution and ended up paying money to buy FilterBox which I've found to be good.

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 :)

The play store should reject apps that use audible notifications other than those controlled by Android platform notification permissions. Making a user dig through an obscure multiple layer settings jungle to track down and kill annoying notifications is a dark pattern and deserves de-platforming. I'm looking at you, Facebook.

I’m now an iOS user but the problem is actually the same here : apps not respecting communication channels to push ads (mostly to their own app or service). I usually fully block notifications from most apps but for some apps the notifications are really convenient (carpooling, transport or delivery app). Yes I want to know if the train I booked is delayed. No I don’t want to be notified that you are now partnering with another transport company and that you are sharing 5% off coupons to try it… I systematically give a 1 star review explaining the issue and mail the devs if possible. I even think that Apple Store and Play Store ToSs are against this practice but they are not enforcing it sadly…

My solution to this problem was to have my phone permanently on silent. The logic being - there was nothing so urgent 25 years ago that couldn't be solved by an asynchronous answering machine message checked once a day; why do I need moment to moment updates now.

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.

I've been happy with the solution of switching off notifications from apps that interrupt me with promotions - one strike and they're out.

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.

This is great! Looking forward to using it. Especially the rule-based filtering function, as my biggest sore spot with notifications are the few handful of highly functional apps that stuff marketing notifications into notification groups that are not marked for marketing.

It would be neat to be able to do LLM filtered notifications. Perhaps with a local LLM for users that prefer.

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.

This is really great. I chuckled seeing MyGate. I hate that app. My society uses it and I'd need this exactly for it. I hate that Android doesn't force devs to use the right notification category. Apps need to be penalized for not adhering to that.

I use an app called BuzzKill on Android for achieving this and many more things. I usually keep my notification bar at an absolute minimum when it comes to the number of notifications, but this app allows me to set rules for notifications based on their content. By default, all apps that I use have notifications turned off by default and they also get into deep sleep mode. So I'm sure they are not even running after a while. Only apps like WhatsApp, Slack, Signal can receive notifications. And by using the rules on Buzzkill, I am also able to automatically discard marketing notifications and useless notifications from these apps as well.

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.

For samsung users I think good lock can do something similar.

Wow, I had no idea Android allowed a third party app to take over absolute control of all notifications. I assume you have to allow it somehow? It’s actually very cool that this is possible. Apple would never even consider allowing this.

Here is a fun story. Just like you, I too live in a “gated community”, and we also default to MyGate. We have a founders group in there, and the things with MyGate and its irritations would sometimes come up. We all would wink and go about our days. The founder of MyGate is in the group and is one of the neighbors. We sometimes teased that we would just camp out outside his home, asking him to fix these excessive notification issues and bugs, and to add/edit features. ;-)

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

The Before Launcher for Android has a notification filter as well, and is a great simple launcher. It doesn't let you create rules, but you can enable/disable each app's notification, choose what kind of notification it gives, and you can enable/disable categories of notifications (call, navigation, event, alarm, progress, system, car_emergency, stopwatch, missed_call, reminder). You swipe right on the launcher and it shows you the pending notifications.

The mygate app you have to use made me curious.

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.

I have an Android phone and it's constantly set to 'Do not disturb'. I only have a couple of people that are exempt (you can do that in the settings). Because of this I am not too fussed about even occasional extra notification, because I deal with all of them when I have time.

Android (at least on Pixel) recently added a notification spam detection system, under the name "Notification Organizer". Unfortunately they don't let you block the spam, only deprioritize it. So it won't make noise, but you still have to manually dismiss it from the notification drawer. The PMs almost had the right idea...

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.

Imho there are 3 separate classes of notifications

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.

This looks nice! I had no idea you could actually control notifications as an app.

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".

Nice to see something like this... I've gotten to where I simply have most app notifications disabled altogether. Pretty much only phone calls and text messages get through, and my text message notification sound is pretty subtle at that.

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.

yes! I looked into implementing adblock on the iPhone notification tray and it didn't look like it was possible. Glad someone is working on it for android.

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.

Looks interesting. Good work. Do you have plans to open source the code?

Is there anything like this for iOS? Or is something like this impossible for a 3rd party to do on iOS?

Love the on-device approach. The fact that it never phones home is a huge differentiator — most "utility" apps these days are just data collection with a feature attached. The regex filtering is clever. Have you thought about adding ML-based classification for notifications that are harder to catch with patterns? Something lightweight like a small on-device model could detect promotional vs. transactional notifications without needing manual rules. Also curious about battery impact — how often does it process the notification stream?

I would love to use this, but I don't want to allow a third party app with closed source to read all my notifications. This can read OTP passwords, full messages, etc. so it must be open source for me to consider it.

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.