In this article, I will cover an awesome notification manager for Android. You might have seen or used lots of notification managers, but you might not have seen an Android notification manager like this before.
Notifix is a free Android app that group your notifications in a similar pattern like Gmail groups various types of emails. If you use Gmail, you might be aware of the fact that Gmail groups similar emails together and make your inbox well-managed and clean. Notifix does the same thing for Android notifications. Both of them (Gmail and Notifix) have 5 different group categories. These categories go as follow:
Gmail: Primary, Social, Promotion, Updates, and Forum
Notifix: Primary, Social, Promotion, Message, and News
Also Read: How to Send an Auto Reply to Messages and Calls on Android
Group Android Notifications Like Gmail With Notifix
Notifix is powered by an open source machine learning framework, TensorFlow. It uses machine learning to process your notifications and groups them into their respective categories.
Set Up
When you launch the app for the first time, it gives you guidance to enable Notifix on your Android device. One the first screen, you get a brief introduction to the app.
After that, it asks you to give Notifix Usage access and Notification access permissions. These permissions are necessary for Notifix, without any of these permissions, it won’t work. The Notification access lets Notifix access the incoming notifications from different apps so that it can group them into their respective categories. Whereas, the Usage Access permit Notifix to see last used applications and clear old notifications.
With those two permissions, Notifix is ready to group your notifications. From now on, it will group your notifications in their respective category.
ML-Based Notification Grouping
After testing Notifix for two days, this is what I learn about its grouping pattern:
Primary: It has all system-level notifications including system apps notifications, like Downloads, Copy/Paste, Google app updates, Play Store notifications, etc.
Social: Find all social media notifications here, like notifications from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
Promotion: It contains all the promotional notifications from apps like Amazon, BestBuy, Network Carrier, etc.
Message: It will have all sort of messages you receive on your phone, whether it’s from social media or a regular text message.
News: Get news update notifications here from different apps, like News Point, Google News, UC News, etc.
Note: Don’t misunderstand Notifix as a notification manager that groups notifications from similar/same app together, because it doesn’t. It is much more than that. Say, you get a promotional notification and an order update notification from Amazon. It will group the promotional notification to the Promotion group and order update notification to the Primary group.
When you click on a group, it expands that group and shows you all its notifications. You can remove any notification by swiping it to left or right or you can remove all notifications of that group with ‘Remove all‘ button present at the bottom right corner. You can also swipe-remove an entire group from the notification drawer as well.
Settings
In the Settings, you can change the time to wait before grouping notifications. Here, you can set the waiting time for each category. For example, if you set the waiting time for the Social category to 5 minutes, Notifix won’t group your new social media notifications for 5 minutes. It will show each social media notification separately for that time period. Here, you can also enable/disable the option to swipe a category when less than 5 notifications are grouped.
The Difference
For a more clear understanding, the screenshots of Android notifications with and without Notifix are attached below. As you can see, with Notifix, notifications are grouped into their respective categories and look very neat. Whereas, in case of without Notifix, even notifications from the same app are stacked on top of another and look very messy.
Download Notifix from Google Play Store here.
Wrap Up
Notifix is ML-based simple yet powerful notification manager for Android. The great thing about this app is that you don’t have to configure anything, it just works. With the rapidly growing notch-trend, better keep that tiny status bar minimal and well-managed.
