Hey everyone,
I switched from a Mi Band to a Garmin Instinct a while back. Garmin is in a league of its own for athletic tracking, but the notification experience felt surprisingly dated compared to what I was used to.
The thing that bugged me most was the double notification problem. I'm literally looking at a message on my phone, and my watch still buzzes for it as if I haven't seen it already. Beyond the annoyance, every notification has a real cost: vibration motor, screen wake-up, BLE communication all quietly draining your watch battery.
There were two other pain points I kept running into:
- If your watch is sitting on the coffee table, it's still buzzing away and anyone nearby might see your personal messages or OTPs
- Garmin Connect's notification controls are minimal, so you have little say in what actually reaches your wrist; which meant constant distractions from notifications I never needed to see
There ween't a solution, so I built one App for android.
So this app is called Notifications + for Garmin, it solves all of this problem simply by acting as a proxy sitting in between your phone and watch letting you control what reaches your wrist.
This app provides following customizations :
-
Wrist detection to send/recieve notifications only if watch is on your wrist
-
Screen detection to send alerts only if your phone screen is off (so you never get the same alert twice)
- Custom word filtering.
- block notifications containing specific words (great for silencing promotional texts and spam)
- Pause notifications temporarily.
- snooze all watch notifications for an hour or two, without fiddling with DND settings
- Battery guard. automatically pause notifications when your watch battery drops below a set percentage
- And more on the way...
How to download
The app is currently in community preview phase. Wanted to get feedback on the app from the community.
1. Join the google group : https://groups.google.com/g/notif-plus-app-testing
2. Register for early access : https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.ansah.notificationsplus
3. Download the Android App
4. Download the companion app : https://apps.garmin.com/apps/f4579d63-61af-4f0a-ae41-0df80d46c637
Screenshots :
Feedback:
If you have any new ideas in mind or have suggestions to improve the app, please FF to comment or fill the below google form :
https://forms.gle/KaPgxh5DN6p5eUsy5
How does the app work ?
Two apps work together; one on your Android phone, one on your Garmin watch. The Garmin app handles wrist detection and battery reporting; all the smart filtering logic runs on the Android side.