An ingenious new Android notification upgrade

Every now and then, a new phone feature comes along that really makes you sit up and say: “Now, that’s cool.”

Today, my fellow Android-appreciating animal, is one of those days — quite literally. No exaggeration: When I first found and tried out the feature we’re about to go over, just a few moments ago, I sat up straight in my chair, made that vaguely Robert-DeNiro-like weird-mouth face that you make when you’re impressed with something, and said out loud to no one in particular: “Now, that’s cool.”

Luckily, I write this column. So what might otherwise come across as crazy can now come across as relatable instead.

The feature in question is an incredibly clever new way to interact with your notifications on Android and know exactly when something important is demanding your attention without ever so much as looking at your phone — or even lifting it out of your pocket. At a time when so many of us are aiming to make our device use more deliberate and less distracting, it’s a brilliant twist that empowers you to stay on top of what matters without being sidetracked by something less pressing.

This feature isn’t associated with AI, Gemini, or anything directly connected to Google, either. It’s from one of Android’s most quietly powerful and impressively practical third-party apps, and it’s something you can add onto any Android device this instant — no matter what company made it or how old it may be.

Prepare yourself for a “That’s cool!”-worthy revelation.

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Your Android notification intelligence booster

I won’t keep you waiting: The feature of which we speak is officially called Pocket Check — and, well, that pretty well sums up what it adds into your life.

Plain and simple, once activated, the system will let you press your phone’s power button anytime the device is in your pocket to find out what alerts are (and aren’t!) awaiting at that specific second. You can have it check for any new notifications or for a specific type of new notification — with as much or as little detail as you like.

If you have any new pending notifications that match whatever parameters you pick, your phone will vibrate back at you three times in a row — so you feel it instantly in your hand and know something new needs to be seen.

If you don’t, you’ll get just a single vibration in return — which is your cue that it’s okay to keep going about your business without pulling your phone out of your pocket and going down a rabbit hole of distractions.

The system is smart, too, and looks only for notifications that arrived after you last locked your device — so anything that’s old and likely already seen won’t be counted. And that, in turn, means you can count on it to reliably let you know only about what’s actually in need of your attention, based on the parameters you yourself set when setting the thing up.

See? Now, that’s cool, isn’t it? And pretty sporkin’ useful, too.

Best of all, you’ll need only about two minutes to get this up and running and ready to serve you — on whatever Android phone you’ve got in your shorts, skorts, or trousers today.

Ready?

2 minutes to smarter Android notification knowledge

The app that makes this Pocket Check sorcery possible is one of my all-time favorite Android power tools — and that’s a crafty li’l creation called BuzzKill.

If you’ve been paying attention for long, you’ve probably heard me talk about BuzzKill before — like how it can help you create custom vibration patterns for different types of alerts or how it can introduce instant notification summaries into any Android environment. It really is one of the best off-the-beaten-path secrets of my personal Android setup, and most everyone who discovers it ends up feeling the same way.

If you aren’t yet familiar with BuzzKill, the easiest way to think of it is as a system that lets you create all sorts of custom filters for your phone’s notifications — kinda like Gmail filters, only for Android notifications instead of emails.

The app’s new Pocket Check addition showed up as a part of an update that’s rolling out this week. It builds on the handy pocket detection option added into BuzzKill earlier this year and takes it to soaring new heights of awesomeness.

And once you wrap your head around it, it really is quite easy to get going:

First, download BuzzKill from the Google Play Store, if you haven’t already.

The app costs four bucks as a one-time purchase. Trust me: It’ll pay for itself in no time and be among the best $4 you ever spend.

And, FYI: BuzzKill doesn’t require any unusual permissions, doesn’t collect any form of data from your phone, and doesn’t have any manner of access to the internet — meaning it’d have no way of sharing your information even if it wanted to. 

Once you’ve gone through the app’s initial setup and gotten to its main screen, tap on the circular button in the lower-right corner of the screen to create a new rule.

That’ll cause a fill-in-the-blank “if this, then that”-style rule to show up. And all that’s left is to fill in those blanks with the specific info we want.

Setting up a new rule in BuzzKill is delightfully easy to do.JR Raphael, Foundry

Now, at the simplest possible level, if you just want Pocket Check to tell you if any new notifications are present whenever you activate it:

Tap the text that says “do nothing,” then find and select “Pocket Check” from the list of options that shows up and tap “Pick action” to confirm it.

Tap “Save rule” to, y’know, save the rule (who woulda thunk?!).

The simplest possible BuzzKill Pocket Check rule — easy peasy!JR Raphael, Foundry

And that’s it: Just plop your phone into your pantaloons pocket, press the power button (a single, short press — not a hold), and wait to see what you feel in response.

Remember:

If it’s a single buzz, you’ve got no new notifications pending.

If it’s three buzzes in a row, something new is there and needing your attention.

Nifty, no?!

And if you want to get even more specific with the sorts of notifications Pocket Check checks for, go back to BuzzKill’s main screen and find the rule we just created. Tap it, then tap the text that says “any app” if you want to limit the check to notifications from certain specific apps only — and/or tap the text that says “contain anything” if you want to limit the check to notifications that contain specific text within ’em only.

From there, the possibilities are practically endless:

You could have the system tell you only if you have new notifications pending in important work apps — stuff like, say, Gmail, Drive, Slack, and Notion — or, on the flip side, only in apps related to your non-work, personal communications, if you’d rather split things up that way.

You could have it look only for specific sorts of high-priority alerts involving certain contacts’ names or important keywords — maybe the title of a particularly topical Slack channel or work project, the subject line of an email thread you really need to keep an eye on, or the name of tasty new pastry you’re really hoping comes back into stock at your favorite feeding station.

Or you could combine those two tactics and have it seek out only new notifications from certain apps that also contain certain keywords.

It’s up to you to get as broad or specific or you want. Personally, I’m finding the feature to be most useful as a general notification checker — ’cause I have a habit of pulling my phone out of my pocket to look and see if I have any new notifications far too often (and, to be fair, I frequently do have new notifications that I somehow didn’t notice when they initially came in). So simply having Pocket Check empower me to perform that same feat without having to take the phone out is a pretty significant upgrade.

The choice is yours, though, and the power is in your hands — with said hands now able to stay firmly in your pockets, without any needless distractions or obvious signals to anyone else that you’re in the midst of a covert check-in.

Now, that’s cool.

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