awaaz

Ugh, thanks for pointing that out. I've pinged Franz about it. I actually host the website for them, but can't fix these buttons since donations are run from a third-party.

Also, this donate link - https://yuwa-india.org/donate/ - does work.

I don't want to hijack the thread, but would like to surface another such organization which I am aware of - Yuwa [1], which operates in India.

It was founded by Franz Gastler [2] when he visited India a couple of decades ago and spent time in some _really_ rural parts of the country. I'm proud to call him a friend, and have volunteered myself at the Yuwa School to teach math/CS. Through this school, girls have ended up at Harvard (!!) with scholarships, who would've never stepped out of their villages and probably ended up as child brides. I usually introduce him to my compatriots as the firangi who's done more for our country than anybody else I know!

[1] https://yuwa-india.org

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Gastler

It should be able to, unless they are using Live Update [0] notifications.

[0] https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/notifications...

You're very kind, thank you!

The starting point is a notification from an app that you want to create a rule for. So you wait for a notification, then click on it in the "History" tab, and then you can configure the rest from there. It's slightly non-intuitive, but the reason for that flow is that the app needs the package name of the app, which almost nobody will know.

This isn't really a commercial project, so not much of that applies.

A month ago, I submitted my app "DoNotNotify" to control Android notifications on Show HN [0], and it trended on the front page for a day. I was happy, but the most upvoted comments on the thread were asking for the app to be open sourced, since it dealt with system-wide notifications. My promises weren't good enough, and the community wanted more!

Why didn't I open source it in the first place? Linux has been by primary driver for more than a decade. I genuinely believe in the philosophy, and have always wanted to give back to the community. The primary reason, probably, was because I was ashamed that I had 90% vibe-coded the app. More than 2 decades of writing software, and my first contribution to FOSS would be AI-generated code? Would it withstand even the most minimal of scrutiny? Would by (unknown) name forever be tarnished? I exaggerate, but only slightly :)

So, yesterday, after a fair bit of trepidation, I changed the github repo visibility to public and put up a announcement on the app's website [1]. I have also submitted the app to F-Droid [2]. As before, I welcome the community's feedback and suggestions!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46499646 [1] https://donotnotify.com/opensource.html [2] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues/3569

-- Anuj Jain

It does have rules for about 25 common apps already built in. I had considered making a feature to 'share' rules with other users of the app, but that would've required Internet access. And as you can see from the comments on this thread, nobody wants an app like this to send data :(

The app requires a very specific permission for this, which it asks for on first launch. It's not even just a popup on which you can tap "Ok" - Android will take you to a special screen from where you need to manually switch on the notifications access for it to work.

iOS doesn't give developers access to other apps' notifications, AFAIK. I'm not an iOS developer though - maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in.

> Have you thought about adding ML-based classification for notifications that are harder to catch with patterns?

Honestly that's a little out my league. The idea did occur to me, but I'm discouraged by the amount of compute required for most ML.

> Also curious about battery impact — how often does it process the notification stream?

The OS sends any new notification to the app (it is a push based approach) automatically. On my own phone, this app currently shows at the bottom of the list in battery usage (<1%).

Fair enough, you only have my word on it (that it doesn't send any data to the Internet). But you do have my word :)

Another person requested that the app be open-sourced as well. I will look into that.

That's a great suggestion. Perhaps in the next version!

Thanks for the heads up! Will take a look at it.

Yes, it requires a special permission, which the app asks for when it is first launched. Thankfully no other permissions are required.

Honestly I did not know about Buzzkill. I suppose the big differentiator is that DoNotNotify is absolutely free.

Personally it just grates me when my notifications stack up (even if I wasn't disturbed when the notifications came in). My philosophy is - I should be able to control what I see, hence this app.

You're welcome, friend!

> I've been happy with the solution of switching off notifications from apps that interrupt me with promotions - one strike and they're out.

I have exactly the same policy. But in my case I am forced to keep notifications enabled from apps like MyGate (since nobody would be able to visit me without it) and I have no say in the matter - my gated society uses it and my only way out is to pay for the app itself.

Can you share a screenshot of the notification, and the rule that you created for it at [email protected] please?

Also, do note that if it is a persistent notification[1] then the Android OS does not allow it to be dismissed. In such a case, you will see the notification in the blocked history with a warning icon next to it.

[1] https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/notifications...

I think it is safe for me say that HN has had a very large role in moulding my personality. A left-leaning atheist who loves computing and is often at odds with the current zeitgeist in India, I find my true home behind a computer screen.. Slashdot was my original initiation, and I moved to Hacker News rather late after a successful YC application. Not much of a contributor, but everyday starts with at least half an hour spent reading the comments here (who RTFAs anyway huh?).

Thank you all. Without you, life would've been much simpler, but not better!

Cheers!

> Also important is that they tend to be Google assets like Gmail.

Long time user of FF on Linux. Primary email is on Gmail and I've never had any trouble. Is there some particular feature that doesn't work?

You're probably thinking of the formal definition of a "bath", as in sitting in a tub of water. Over here in India, bathing and taking a shower mean the same thing.

> cheap oil, though. I doubt it will offset the effects of reduced exports to the US but it usually has a positive effect on the economy.

And a terrible effect on the environment. But that's not what anybody is worried about right now.

I just spent the last few weeks figuring out how to solve this problem for myself after running out of space on my free Google plan, so here goes.. I do have a NAS at home, so I was basically trying to move my backup from Google Cloud to my local NAS. Another consideration was that my wife should be able to use the solution so it needed to be simple and hands-off.

Probably the most difficult to solve for is Google Photos. Google offers 15 GB, and this gets filled up really fast if you take a lot of photos and videos. I don't, but still with every phone upgrade I've tried to move all files over to my new device, which results in space running out quite quickly. On top of that, Photos is actually _really_ nice. It works seamlessly, and offers features like facial recognition out of the box.

Anyway, I tried 3 different options - Nextcloud, Syncthing, and Immich.

Nextcloud was a little too complicated to setup, even with docker. Wasn't impressed by it.

Syncthing had an issue with Android app support. I think there are a couple of forks, but I didn't want to rely on that.

Immich was what I finally settled on. It is photos/videos specific, so doesn't work as a general purpose backup but I was more than happy just solving for this. My Google storage was being used roughly half and half by Email and Photos. Solving for half was good enough! On the plus side, Immich is a really impressive Google Photos replacement, and behaves almost exactly the same as the Google app, and has advanced features like facial recognition, dupe detection etc.

For email, contacts, SMS etc, I'm still relying on native Google backup.

Finally, there was Whatsapp. I had disabled Google backup a while ago, but wanted to preserve the photos from it. For that, I configured Immich to sync the whatsapp images folder with my library, and that's been working perfectly well.

The game was initially developed as a single-player game (kind of like Tetris). Then to make it multiplayer the entire session management and messaging was moved to a third-party service (it was called electroserver, IIRC). Don't really remember the details now unfortunately!

Oh man, do I have fond memories of developing on feature phones!

Started wayyy back in 2007, and was a cofounder of a startup that made popular J2ME games available for free to people by wrapping it in our proprietary ad serving software. We launched more or less the same time that AbMob did, invented more or less the same stack (ad delivery to mobile phones), but we focussed on the product (games) whereas they focussed on the platform (ad delivery). A few years later AdMob was acquired for mega $$$ by Google, whereas we just kind of limped along and died a slow, natural death! Many years later I discovered that my cofounder just let our 4 letter domain expire (www.hovr.com) and I think it's up for sale now :(

Also remember developing games on the BREW platform by Qualcomm, circa 2005. Whereas I was in India which mostly had GSM J2ME phones, BREW was much more popular on North American CDMA handsets. I, along with a friend, developed one of the first real-time multiplayer games called Blingster Battle, which was on top of Verizon's charts for a brief period of time! Truly groundbreaking stuff at that time..

The most amazing bit, though, was when we made some BREW apps around 2013. By then iOS and Android had firmly taken over the smartphone market, and all the cool kids were downloading apps/games on them. However there was a very significant portion of the market - primarily composed of the elderly - who were still hanging on to their old CDMA feature phones and were still interested in buying new apps. We made a couple of quiz types games, that actually generated a couple of thousand dollars in revenue every month till last year, until Qualcomm finally pulled the plug on BREW!

Curious to see how this plays out in a country like mine (India) where the government loves [1] to shut off Internet access on the flimsiest of excuses. Everything from entire states (like Kashmir), to few localities (farmer protests around Delhi) have had their mobile Internet access switched off because the government likes to curtail communication when it suits them.

[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/diu/story/more-than-400-internet-l...