FAQ

Android only lets an app read notifications through the notification-listener permission, and it can't be granted from a pop-up — you have to switch it on yourself in system settings. Without it Notify cannot see anything at all, which is why it asks before you can use the app.

No. Android keeps no history for apps to read, so nothing that arrived before you granted access can be recovered. Notify starts from the moment you switch it on.

30 days by default. Anything older is deleted automatically — there is a daily sweep, plus one every time you open the app. You can change the window to 60, 90 or 180 days in Settings. Shortening it deletes the now-expired notifications immediately.

The one exception is anything you keep. Open a notification, tap Keep, and it stays until you say otherwise — the cleanup passes over it however old it gets. Your kept notifications are behind the heart button on the Search screen.

Keeping pauses the clock rather than resetting it. Stop keeping something that is already older than your window and it goes at the next cleanup, so the app asks first in that case.

Your phone put Notify to sleep. Some phones — Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO especially — kill background services after a few minutes to save battery. The notification access switch stays on, so everything looks fine, but nothing is being recorded.

When this happens the home screen shows a card that says so, with a Fix button. Tap it and Notify reconnects.

To stop it happening again, tell your phone to leave Notify alone. On Xiaomi, Redmi and POCO you need two things: allow Autostart, and set battery saver to No restrictions. Both are on that same card. On other phones, allow Notify to run without battery limits.

Notify does no work in the background. It only wakes when a notification arrives, writes one row, and goes back to sleep. These settings do not cost battery; they only stop the phone from switching the app off.

A few kinds are skipped on purpose. Ongoing notifications — music players, navigation, timers — are ignored because they rewrite themselves every second or two and would bury everything else.

Anything showing a progress bar is skipped for the same reason: an upload or a download republishes itself at every percent, so one video post would otherwise leave a hundred entries reading “1%”, “2%”, “3%” and so on. The finished notification is still kept, so you keep the part worth keeping.

Notifications that only exist to say a service is running are skipped as well. Messenger’s “Chat heads active” is the one people notice: it rewrites itself every time the conversation count changes, so it would leave dozens of near-identical rows a day without ever telling you anything. The same goes for sync indicators, VPN and hotspot status, and anything else in that family — across every app, not just Messenger.

Group summary headers are skipped because the individual notifications are kept instead. Apps you've paused are skipped. And nothing that arrived before you granted access can be recovered.

Android re-delivers a notification every time an app updates it in place, and some apps re-announce the same thing again a minute or two later. Notify treats a word-for-word identical message from the same app within five minutes as the same notification, so one alert doesn’t fill the list with copies of itself.

The trade is that if someone genuinely sends you the same message twice inside five minutes, you’ll see it once. There is no way to tell that apart from an app repeating itself, and the repeats are far more common.

Sometimes. If the notification is still sitting in your notification shade and the app that sent it supports quick replies — most messaging apps do — a reply box appears when you open it. What you type goes straight to that app and shows up in the conversation there, exactly as if you had typed it in the app itself.

It stops working once a notification has been dismissed or cleared. Android only allows a reply while the notification is live, so this never works on older history no matter how recent it looks. Notify keeps no copy of anything you send.

Because the notification arrived with one. A YouTube channel, a person messaging you, a shop — many apps attach the sender’s icon, and Notify shows it so a row tells you who it was from at a glance rather than just which app carried it. Round means a sender; the rounded square is the app’s own icon, used when no sender icon was supplied.

Each icon is kept once, however many notifications use it, and it goes when the last of those notifications does. Nothing about it leaves your device.

Sometimes. Some apps attach the picture to the notification itself — when they do, it appears in Notify when you open that notification, and you can tap it to fill the screen.

Many apps don’t. Plenty send only the words “Ana sent a photo” and fetch the picture when you open them, and in that case there is nothing for Notify to show. It varies by app, so expect it to work for some and not others.

By default a picture only shows while the notification is still in your shade, because that is the only time Android lets any app read it. Turn on Save photos in Settings and Notify keeps a copy on your device instead, so the picture stays with your history. Saved pictures are deleted along with the notification they belong to, and turning the setting off deletes the ones already saved.

Videos can’t be played, but you do get a look at them. Where an app attaches a clip, Notify takes a single frame from about a second in and shows that — enough to see what it is of. With Save photos on, that frame is kept like any other picture.

A short list of things from the last day that might still be outstanding: a one-time code recent enough to still work, calls you missed, messages still sitting unread in your notification shade, and an app that has sent far more than everything else put together. Tapping any line opens the notification it came from, so you can always check it yourself.

It appears only when something clears the bar, which on a quiet day means not at all. Nothing here is a guess about what matters to you — each line is a plain rule applied to information the app already has, worked out on your device, and none of it is sent anywhere.

Only if you ask it to. Out of the box it posts nothing at all — no “Notify is running” banner, no badge, nothing in your shade. It doesn’t need one: Android wakes it when a notification arrives and it goes back to sleep.

There is one thing you can switch on. Morning summary, in Settings, posts a single notification each morning listing what came in while you were away. You choose the time, and on a morning with nothing to report it stays quiet rather than telling you so. Android will ask permission the moment you turn it on, and turning it off stops it immediately.

It stops Notify recording anything new from that app. Notifications already captured stay in your history. Resume it any time from the same menu on the By app screen.

Yes. On the By app screen, open the menu next to an app and choose Download PDF. Your device's file picker opens so you choose where it goes, and Notify writes a dated PDF of that app's stored notifications there — grouped by day, with the time, title and full text of each one. It is made entirely on your device; nothing is uploaded to produce it. Once saved it is an ordinary file that Notify no longer controls, so it isn't deleted by your retention window or by clearing your history.

No. Clearing history and deleting an app's history are permanent — there is no undo and no copy stored anywhere else.

No. Your notifications are stored in a private database that only this app can read, and their content is never transmitted, sold or shared — not to the developer, and not to the advertising network.

The app does use the internet for two things, neither of which carries your notifications: the feedback message you write and send yourself, and the ads that keep Notify free. The Privacy page describes both in full.

They're what keeps the app free. Ads are served by Google AdMob and are requested with no information about your notifications — nothing from your history is used to choose one. You can limit ad personalisation in Android's Settings → Privacy → Ads, and a purchase to remove ads entirely is planned for a future update.

It shouldn't. Notify does no polling and runs no background service of its own. Android wakes it only when a notification arrives, it writes one row, and goes back to sleep. The only scheduled work is the once-a-day cleanup, which runs when the battery isn't low.