Meet BuzzKill — Notification Superpowers

What is BuzzKill?

BuzzKill is an Android app that allows you to take control of your notifications. It allows you to build “rules”, which are automations that react to notifications. It allows you to say “When I get a notification about X, then do Y”.

Creating your first rule

In BuzzKill rules are built as sentences. Anything with a squiggly line under it means you can tap it to change it.

By default a rule will trigger on notifications from all apps with any content. On the rule creation screen you can filter this down as much as you’d like, so only the specific notifications you want will trigger the rule. For example you can trigger on only notifications that contain both “Wife” & “Emergency”, or either of them or none of them. You can mute notifications only between the hours of 8AM-5PM on weekdays or only notifications from WhatsApp.

Once you’ve filtered down the notifications, you then choose an action. Actions are tiny programs within BuzzKill that perform what you want to happen.

What actions are there?

All actions in BuzzKill are easy to use, allowing you to setup in seconds what would have taken hours in other automation apps. As of writing there are 18 actions built into BuzzKill, here are 8 of them:

Have you ever been in a chat group and your phone won’t stop buzzing because people are sending messages every few seconds. Usually the only solution is to mute the chat, but this gets rid of the notifications completely and means you have to manually check for new messages. Cooldown triggers when you receive multiple notifications in a row and mutes them. So for example you’ll be alerted for the first message, but then you won’t be alerted for any more messages in the next 5 minutes.

Alarm is designed to get your attention in an emergency. When you get a notification that triggers it BuzzKill will wake up your device and start an alarm to wake you up. If you have a security system like Blink, Eufy, Nest or Ring then you can use this action to wake you up if there’s an intruder at night.

Custom alert allows you to change the vibration pattern or sound of any notification. That way you’ll be able to tell even without looking at your phone what notification just arrived. Want a specific sound to play when you get a notification containing a word? That’s doable in seconds with this action.

Ever accidentally swiped away a notification and needed to open the app to find out what it was? Undo gives you 10 seconds after you swipe away a notification to see it or restore it before it actually is dismissed from your notification tray. You can also restore notifications from inside the BuzzKill app too.

Snooze allows you set up time periods where you’re busy, and notifications will be snoozed until you’re available again. For example, if you want to snooze all work emails after 5pm until 9am the next morning then you can do that quite easily. Or snooze any WhatsApp messages until after you get home on weekdays then that’s also possible. Due to BuzzKill’s powerful filtering, you can set up snooze for specific apps, notification contents and an unlimited number of busy time periods.

Dismiss is the simplest action, it just dismisses. If you’ve got a news app and you don’t want to see notifications on specific topics then you can just have BuzzKill dismiss them before they pop up.

Reminder gives you little nudges if you haven’t seen a notification yet. If you get a notification whilst your phone is in your pocket and you can’t look at it right away, it’s easily forgotten and it may go a long time unanswered. Reminder let’s you choose specific notifications that will nudge you every 10 minutes until you look at your phone.

Sticky is great for todo list apps like Google Tasks. It makes the notifications sticky so you can’t accidentally dismiss them. For a task that needs to be completed, that means the notification won’t be dismissed until you have completed it.

And many more, new actions are constantly being added to BuzzKill.

Notification history

On top of rules, BuzzKill is a fully featured notification history app. It allows you to find dismissed notifications, restore them and see a full breakdown of your notification history.

Is it safe?

BuzzKill is privacy first. There are no ads, no trackers and no data ever leaves your device. Unlike pretty much every app on your phone on the Play Store it doesn’t have access to the internet (you can check) so you can be sure that your data is safe.

If you’re interesting in checking it out, you can download it at: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston.buzzkill