BuzzKill Is the Best Way to Manage Android Notifications
Phone notifications are hard to balance: there are too many of them, and you’re constantly interrupted by calls and calls. Too few of them, and you risk missing something important, from a relative in trouble to a big man with headphones (two ends of the scale of importance here, but you get the idea).
Over the years, Apple and Google have refined and refined the notification systems built into iOS and Android, but there’s still room for improvement. The built-in features that are currently available work fine , but they lack the fine-grained control needed to properly manage the alerts you need and the ones you don’t need.
Enter BuzzKill : it’s Android only (sorry iPhone users) and it’ll cost you $4, but it does a great job managing notifications. It’s the perfect solution, giving you a powerful set of options that you can manage without feeling overwhelmed or cluttered, and may be just the notification solution you’ve been looking for.
Unfortunately, there’s no free trial, although the developer promises to refund your money if you’re unhappy with the app – and while I’m walking you through some of the features it offers here, you should get a good idea of whether you’ll find this app useful on your phone.
Creating Rules in BuzzKill
Download BuzzKill for the first time, and once you’ve given it the necessary permissions to run in the background and access your notifications, you’re ready to add your first rule: click Create Rule to do so. This will take you to the Rules Builder, which will look familiar if you’ve ever tried to set up filters for your email .
Each rule has two parts: how to define the alerts that satisfy it (click on any app and contains anything to specify the criteria), and then the action to take to match the alerts (click on Do Nothing to set the action). To start, you need to select a specific app – be it Uber, WhatsApp or any other app you have installed – and you can select multiple apps for each rule.
You can leave a rule that will apply to all notifications from the applications you select, or specify additional filters. BuzzKill can look for words or phrases inside notifications, as well as certain attributes of the notification – such as whether it has an image or is from a group conversation (useful for those group chats).
This way you can create quite complex filters and even nest certain criteria in subgroups. You can ask BuzzKill to match all the filter rules you list, or just some of them (so a rule might apply to messages from group chats, or to messages with images in them, or only when both of these criteria are met, for example).
All you have to do is specify the action you want BuzzKill to take, and this is where the app really proves its worth. You can do everything from muting an alert to unmuting it even if your phone is muted, so BuzzKill is useful for drawing your attention to important notifications as well as reducing distractions from smaller ones. You can also call up BuzzKill’s popular Tasker automation tool for even more control.
Managing Rules in BuzzKill
Once you’ve started creating rules in the app, they can be managed in the Rules tab: simple toggles let you turn them on or off, and you can delete and duplicate rules by clicking the three dots in the top left corner of the rules box.
In the History tab, you can view statistics about all the notifications received on your phone, with filters and summaries available if you need them. One of the handy features on this screen is the ability to create a new rule based on a notification you’ve already received: simply click on the notification and select Create Rule .
The Explore tab provides some examples of what BuzzKill can do and is a great resource for finding inspiration. For example, you can set up automatic replies to incoming messages, snooze notifications that come one after another, or create a custom vibration for messages from a specific contact.
Head over to the Settings tab and you’ll be able to play around with some of the app’s options. From here, you can give BuzzKill control over persistent notifications that appear in the status bar and create shortcuts to quickly launch rules from the home screen or quick settings panel on Android.
I find BuzzKill most useful for turning off apps I don’t particularly want to hear about during the day without completely losing those notifications—on top of the features you get with Android itself. Creating and managing rules is also easy, and there’s an export tool to transfer them to another device (BuzzKill is especially privacy-conscious and doesn’t connect to the internet).