Notification Screening

Notification Screening

Screens notifications from chosen apps through the same Number/Text Rules used for real calls/SMS, and dismisses the notification if the result is Block. This works for RCS, Signal, WhatsApp, email, and any other messaging app that posts a notification, even if it isn't your default SMS app, by reading the notification's title/body directly.

Setup

1. Grant Notification Access when prompted (Settings → Screening → Notifications).
2. Pick the app(s) to screen with the icon picker next to the toggle.
3. On a Number Rule or Text Rule, enable Title / Body under "Apply to Notifications" so that rule is checked against the screened notification's title/body, the same way it would be checked against a real incoming SMS.
4. If the result is Block, the notification is dismissed automatically.

This works independently of the SMS/MMS switch. It only needs Notification Access permission, not SMS permission.

How matching works

• Phone-number-shaped substrings are extracted from the notification's title/body (tolerating dashes/spaces/parens/+ formatting), then each candidate is matched against Number Rules the same way a real incoming number would be, including the rule's own Raw Number / Ignore Country Code flags.
• Text Rules are checked with "contains" semantics against the title/body, so the regex just needs to appear somewhere in the text, not match the whole string.
• Notifications are de-duplicated by packageName|title|text content, not by the OS notification key, since some apps reassign a new key on unrelated reposts (e.g. a summary/group refresh) without changing the actual content.

Alerts vs. Notifications

Notification Screening intentionally does not produce a duplicate full system notification when it allows a message, since the original app's own notification is already visible. Instead, use Alerts for a brief sound/vibration/flashlight/screen-wake chime, useful if you've muted that app's own notification channel to silence blocked ones (which would otherwise also silence the allowed ones).

Known limitations

• Only the notification's title/body text is visible, not the full message content, attachments, or anything requiring the real SMS/MMS body.
• The original app's own notification may briefly appear (with its own sound/vibration) before this app can dismiss it. Android delivers the notification to all listeners simultaneously, so there's no way to intercept it before the original app's own alert fires. If this is annoying for a specific app, you can disable that app's own notifications in system settings and use Alerts instead.
• Basic Rules (Contacts, SpamDB, Meeting Mode, etc.) also run against notification-screening checks, since the same rule-checking pipeline is reused. They evaluate against the extracted number/text, not a "real" caller/SMS context, so results can occasionally be less meaningful for a rule that assumes real call/SMS semantics.