I Built the Notification Silencer I Actually Wanted to Use

I've tried quite a few notification blocker apps over the years.

Some of them are genuinely impressive, and there are devs who have clearly put a lot of work into building them. But for whatever reason, none of them ever really resonated with me.

More importantly, I had one major problem with all of them.

Notification access.

Android's notification access permission is powerful. An app with notification access can see the notifications appearing on your device, which can potentially include messages, notification previews, account information, verification codes, and other things you probably do not want sitting in the hands of an app you downloaded five minutes ago.

Maybe that's overly paranoid.

I'm comfortable admitting that.

I just don't like giving that kind of access to an application unless I have a very good reason to trust it.

And that left me with a problem.

I wanted a notification blocker that could give me extremely granular control over what gets blocked, but I also wanted something I could actually trust.

So I decided to build it myself.

There was another reason too.

I kept receiving these incredibly annoying Google Play Store recommendation notifications, which showed up as Honor notifications on my phone. I could not find any useful information about them anywhere.

I went through practically every notification setting I could find that seemed like it might be responsible. I tried different settings, looked through the available notification channels, and generally tried everything I could think of.

Nothing worked.

At that point, I thought, fine, I'll do it myself.

Ironically, only about a week after I had actually built NotifSilencer, a post surfaced explaining exactly where those particular notifications could be disabled. Funny how that works right? They call him Murphy or something, I don't know.

So technically, I eventually found the answer.

But by then, I already had something better for my own purposes.

I had my own notification silencer, I could block exactly what I wanted, and most importantly, I knew exactly what the application was doing.

And honestly, I'm pretty happy with that outcome.

Meet NotifSilencer

NotifSilencer is an open source Android notification silencer built around a simple idea,

You should be able to decide exactly which notifications you want to see.

I did not want to block an entire application just because one particular type of notification annoyed me.

I wanted to be able to say,

Block this notification, but leave everything else alone.

That is what NotifSilencer is designed to do.

Block exactly what you want

NotifSilencer lets you create rules based on the actual characteristics of a notification.

You can filter notifications using things like,

• Specific applications
• Notification content
• Keywords
• Notification channel IDs
• Custom blocking rules
• Allow and override rules
• Tap to block notifications

This means you can get extremely specific.

For example,

Block Instagram notifications containing "suggested for you"

while still allowing direct messages.

Or,

Block a specific WhatsApp notification channel

while keeping other WhatsApp notifications enabled.

Or simply,

Block notifications containing "SALE"

The idea is that you should not have to choose between seeing everything and seeing nothing.

But privacy was just as important to me

This was probably the biggest reason I built it.

I wanted something where I could look at the source code and understand exactly what was happening.

NotifSilencer is open source.

There is no reason for me to ask you to blindly trust the developer with notification access. You can inspect the project yourself.

I'm also not interested in building some complicated ecosystem around your notifications.

Your notifications are your business.

The filtering should happen on your device, and that is where the notification data should stay.

I am not saying other notification apps are malicious or that their developers cannot be trusted.

There are plenty of good developers building useful applications.

I'm just paranoid about permissions.

If an app needs access to potentially sensitive information on my phone, I personally want to know exactly what it is doing with that information.

That is the standard I wanted for myself, so that is the standard I wanted for this project.

Why not just use Android's built in controls?

Android's notification controls are useful, but they can still be too broad when you want more precise filtering.

Sometimes you don't want to disable an application.

You don't even necessarily want to disable an entire notification channel.

You just want to get rid of that one insufferable notification.

That is where NotifSilencer comes in.

The goal

I wanted something simple,

Keep the notifications I care about.

Block the ones I don't.

Don't give the application more information than it needs.

And most importantly,

Let me see exactly what the software is doing.

That is essentially the philosophy behind NotifSilencer.

It is not intended to be a replacement for every notification management application out there.

There are other projects doing interesting things in this space, and I have nothing against them or their developers.

They simply weren't what I was looking for.

So I built what I wanted.

Open source

If you want to have a look at the project, the source is available here,

GitHub,
https://github.com/chantleyw/NotifSilencer

If you've ever wanted much more precise control over your Android notifications, I'd be interested to hear what kinds of notification rules you would create.

And if you're just as paranoid about notification access as I am, then hopefully you'll understand exactly why I built this.