Android Notifications Are Broken: This App Wants to Change That

Android notifications are broken. There’s no way for them to appear at the right time. Daywise wants to change that or at least try – here’s how?

Google has tried its best to make Android notifications useful and not drive you insane. Spend 5 minutes with an iPhone and you’ll come back to your Android smartphone feeling grateful. Google has a lot to do to work on notifications to make them even better. The latest notification tweaks with the Android Q beta aren’t helping.

Android Q, Day 12:
I still fail notification dismissal every. single. time. https://t.co/XvIIJkethQ

— Ron Amadeo (@RonAmadeo) March 26, 2019

This is why the team of developers at Daywise teamed up with the behavioural lab at Duke University to at least revolutionize notifications and how they work.

What is Daywise?

The app is an intelligent assistant that checks through your notifications, sorts them out depending on the priority you give them and notifies you appropriately. With Daywise, you’ll only see important notifications instantly and view the rest later on your time.

How do I start using Daywise?

After installing the app, the app scans your phone’s apps then recommends which apps should notify you as soon as something comes up and the rest are put in the batch system where Daywise presents them as notification batches – these are low-priority notifications the app has gathered over time for you to act on in a single setting. intercepts your notifications and you set a schedule of when you want to get your notifications.

The default batches come in the morning, midday, early evening and the last one before nighttime but you’re allowed to customise them according to your preferences so now the notifications work on your own routine instead of being a slave to them. For notifications the app gets misplaced, you can tweak them to set them straight.

It gets better

You can set specific notifications that you want to be alerted on such as Twitter Direct Messages and not all Twitter notifications. With Daywise, VIP contacts such as your significant other can be assigned in a separate section and so you’ll be able to get their notifications instantly even when the said app isn’t designated for instant alerts. You can even whitelist notifications and Daywise will save them to present to you in batches during the day.

Clicking a Daywise alert lets you see all the bundled notifications. Tap on it to open, wipe to the side to delete or click the menu icon to change its preference so that next time it becomes an instant alert.

Privacy Concerns

The app is a third party client and has to intercept all your notifications. The Daywise app stores form metadata – these are your frequency and behaviour of your notification patterns for better scheduling.

To answer the privacy concerns, the team at Daywise all these data is assigned an anonymous ID, encrypted and stored in password-protected databases. For now, it’s free and in beta on the Google Play store and will go with a paid subscription model so as not to use your data for ads as seen on their privacy policy page. They might also work with other developers to integrate these features into their apps.

In the near future, Daywise will store and process all the important data on your device and also allow for requests so that your data is deleted immediately. That process is done manually if you reach out to them.

Conclusion

This is a neat idea generally and the Android team should just get this feature baked in Android Q and perhaps port to other Android versions.

If the app has intrigued you, get it here.