Privacy-First Design

Appreciation for offline processing, no servers or tracking, discussion of data collection by typical utility apps, trust implications

Users strongly praise the app’s strictly offline, on-device architecture, viewing its lack of data collection as a refreshing contrast to typical utility apps that prioritize "phoning home." This commitment to privacy is so central that the developer deliberately omitted community rule-sharing features to ensure the app never requires internet access, thereby maintaining absolute user trust. The discussion also explores technical refinements, such as using lightweight on-device machine learning for classification and questioning the inherent privacy risks of relying on Google's push notification infrastructure.

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Love the on-device approach. The fact that it never phones home is a huge differentiator — most "utility" apps these days are just data collection with a feature attached.
The regex filtering is clever. Have you thought about adding ML-based classification for notifications that are harder to catch with patterns? Something lightweight like a small on-device model could detect promotional vs. transactional notifications without needing manual rules.
Also curious about battery impact — how often does it process the notification stream?

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It does have rules for about 25 common apps already built in. I had considered making a feature to 'share' rules with other users of the app, but that would've required Internet access. And as you can see from the comments on this thread, nobody wants an app like this to send data :(

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With apps like Signal, installed via apk, without going through Google on a de-Googled phone, I receive notifications in real time. What's the point of having all notifications go through Google, except to save some battery life and data?

Also, can Google read push notifications going through FCM?

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