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.

A few kinds are skipped on purpose. Ongoing notifications — music players, downloads, navigation, timers — are ignored because they rewrite themselves every second or two and would bury everything else. 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. Notify ignores an identical message from the same app within 30 seconds, so a single notification doesn't fill the list with copies.

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.