Frequently Asked Questions and Guides
Guide
Quick Start
- Install the app and grant permissions
- Configure your watch to only show notifications from “Notifications Relay”
- Create your first rule to define which notifications are important
- Test and adjust your rules based on what you see
What you’ll need
To use Notifications Relay, you’ll need:
- An Android phone
- A smartwatch (Garmin, Samsung Galaxy Watch, Amazfit, etc.)
- The companion app for your watch installed on your phone (like Garmin Connect, Galaxy Wearable, etc.)
Overview
Notifications Relay app works by filtering and relaying (forwarding) only some of the notifications you see on your phone to your watch.
Setup
At startup, you will be asked to give the app permissions to read and send messages. It’s also a good idea to allow the app to run in the background so it will not miss notifications.
The next step is to configure your watch app to stop showing all notifications and only display the “priority” ones. For example, in the Garmin Connect app you need to navigate to “More > Settings > Notifications > App Notifications” and then deselect all apps except “Notifications Relay”. At this point you will stop receiving any notifications on your watch as we don’t yet have any rules to tell which notifications are important. Let’s now create some rules.
Overview of screens
The app has three main screens:
Rules screen - This is where you’ll spend most of your time. It displays quick and advanced rules and allows you to quickly toggle them on and off and rearrange their order for convenience.
Log screen has two tabs:
All “incoming” notifications from all apps to check the recent history. You can click any notification to inspect its details.
“Relayed” messages history showing a notification and the rule that matched it.
More screen contains a few global application settings, links to this website and the feedback button.
Creating rules
To create a new rule open the “rules” screen and select “quick” or “advanced” rule:
- “Quick” rule allows very simple matching by application and optional text. This is useful when you want to show all notifications from an app or are not sure which messages to ignore yet. There are not many options to set, and it’s a good choice when you’re only getting started.
- “Advanced” rule provides maximum flexibility - you can add multiple different conditions and combine them to fine-tune the rule and match exactly what you need. All top-level conditions have to be met, but you can add a nested compound condition “any of” to match at least one of the conditions. You can also negate the conditions. Text patterns support wildcards and special characters (see Text matching rules for details). Let’s look at an example of a fairly complicated rule for the Telegram app that will only show direct text messages from Kate and Greg or when someone mentions us:
Let’s walk through all conditions here (remember that all top-level conditions have to be met):
- Application is Telegram
- Any of the following:
- notification title is “/Alex”. The ’/’ at the beginning means exact match - we want to match only notifications where the title is exactly “Alex” (the name of a direct chat), not anything with “Alex” in the title like “Group chat: Alex” when Alex sent a message to a group, not to us directly;
- notification title is “/Greg” - similar to above;
- text contains “@my_telegram” - to get messages when we are mentioned directly.
- Text is NOT a string like ”👻 Sticker”, so we are not bothered with them.
Clicking the “matches” button (located at the top of the rule editor) will show you which of the recent notifications would be matched by the rule and preview what will be relayed. By default the app will delete all messages older than 30 days; that can be adjusted in settings.
You can also create multiple rules for the same app - if any of them match the notification, then you will see it.
Having multiple separate rules also has the benefit of being able to disable them separately.
FAQ
How to disable notifications for all apps except “Notifications Relay”
Specific brands:
Text matching rules
Simple text matching patterns are supported:
- / at the beginning indicates that text should match the whole string. Otherwise matches a substring.
- * matches any number of characters
- ? matches any single character
- \ escapes the next symbol
- Note: All matching is case insensitive - uppercase and lowercase letters are treated as equivalent.
Examples:
Kate- matches any text containing “Kate” (e.g., “Message from KATE”, “skateboarder”, etc.)/Kate- matches only the exact text “Kate”, “kate” (but not “Kate is here”)important*today- matches “important task to be done today”\*\?- matches the literal text ”*?” anywhere.