10 Android Apps for Smarter Notifications

For mobile users, app notifications enhance the overall mobile experience and provide an easy way for users to get updates from the various apps they own and networks they are on. Although Android’s notification system has undergone constant improvements, there’s still a lot of room for fixing notification issues .

In this post, we’re going to showcase some smart Android apps that help you manage app notifications more efficiently than the stock notification you are on now.

Snowball

Snowball is a smooth and intelligent notification app, which can organize important notifications, like from your email, calendar, notes, and more, all in one place. You can also check and reply all your notifications from Facebook, WhatsApp, Line, Telegram and even SMS, right from the notification panel. Who has time to run an app just to clear something up?

With Snowball, you can select specific sounds for notifications or choose to hide annoying notifications with a single swipe. With Snowball at work on your Android, you can focus only on updates and notifications that really matters.

APUS Message Center

Already installed in over 28 million devices in the world, the APUS Message Centre offers an easy-to-use interface for you to check all your notifications in one go. The app groups your WhatsApp messages, emails, SMS, missed calls, and various social apps on the same panel. APUS Message Center can also show the number of unread messages over the app icons and folders if you use the APUS Launcher.

You can instantly reply from the panel without visiting every application, like what Snowball offers. The other good thing about this app is its is APUS Message Center’s superb compatibility with most Android versions and devices.

Desktop Notifications

Desktop Notifications app allows you to check notifications while you work on your computer. Instead of having to grab your phone whenever a new notification comes, read them directly on your desktop, within a browser. All you need is the app on your mobile and the companion extension on your Chrome or Firefox browser.

Desktop Notifications comes with a simple interface that provides you numerous features to set notification access methods for individual apps. It is compatible with all popular apps including messengers like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Hangouts. Interesting bit: the app was built to facilitate a scientific research which you can read about here.

Floatify – Quick Replies

Floatify gives you mini heads-up notifications whenever you’re in full screen mode and can’t slide the notification panel to check new notifications. Its Direct Reply lets you pick predefined replies, which you can tap to send instantly. It also allows instant replies or marking them as ‘read’ from the notifications without having to open any of the apps. It works with major messenger apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Skype, WeChat and more.

Floatify features Smart Wake notifications that turns on the phone’s display as soon as you pick up your phone. Smart Blacklist lets you auto-hide notifications while you browse the web, watch videos or play games.

Heads-up Notifications

Heads-up Notifications offers floating pop-up notifications. Whenever there is a new notification, the message pops up on your phone screen, allowing you to read the full text. Heads-up Notifications, unlike Lollipop’s popup notifications, works on Android versions down the line, from Android 3.1 onwards and even supports some smartwatches.

It also has a unique ‘pocket detection‘ feature: whenever you receive a notification and you take the device out of the pocket, this feature turns on the phone’s display automatically. After more than 900,000 downloads, the bad news is that the creator has moved on to other projects and will no longer provide support for the app.

Echo

Echo is a fast and good-looking lockscreen notification app that displays complete notifications rather than just titles on the lock screen. It also allows one to view and manage the notifications directly from the lock screen.

Echo offers a plain interface and displays all the notifications, divided into your pre-defined categories, like priorities, work, social and so on. With its ‘snooze notifications’ feature, you can also snooze notifications and check them at a later time per your convenience. Moreover, like all lockscreens, it also guards your privacy using a pattern lock.

Flashlight Notification

Flashlight Notification is a lightweight notification app with elegant look and feel and a user-friendly interface which enables flash alerts for the notifications, literally. It uses blinking lights to alert you about incoming calls and notifications. You can rest assured you’d never miss something important again.

Flashlight Notification is especially useful in situations where you are forced to mute your phone, for ex, office meetings. You can select preferred apps to see flash light blinking for, keeping the rest to check at leisure and turn off flash alerts when the battery is low. You can change the light’s alert speed and even stop it with the volume or power button.

Metro Notifications

Metro Notifications displays hover notification banners on your phone. You can dismiss any notification by swiping it to the right, or to the left to dismiss all notifications. The app even lets you choose custom colours for each app notifications, making it easier to identify the priority of those notifications.

Metro Notifications can display notifications even when the phone is locked and it shows the entire text of the message right on the lockscreen. You can also configure which apps should display notifications and which should lie hidden because of their low importance.

Talking Notification Girl

Talking Notification Girl is one-of-a-kind notification app, which announces notifications, like emails, SMSes, calls, IMs and other alerts the way you want. There is an option to read out notifications per your priority configuration. It uses your phone’s built-in text-to-speech engine, hence you can customize its voice directly from the settings.

Talking Notification Girl also shows animated avatars on the screen to enhance the overall user experience and make your notifications more interesting. Once you start using this app, it feels great to hear a voice of your choice alerting you about app notifications. And you never have to look at your phone to know what notification came in anymore.

Shouter

Shouter is a notification reader that shouts out information like the caller’s name when the phone is ringing. What’s more, in case you are too busy to read the message, Shouter will read out your text messages for you and even make announcements for notifications from all apps.

You can easily disable notifications from unnecessary apps and unknown numbers. It even repeats the message, and can read messages even when the phone is locked. Moreover, you can disable message reading from unknown numbers, during silent hours and plenty of other settings.

Which notification manager do you like the most? What’s your strategy to manage notifications efficiently? Send us your stories through the comments below.