Published on Thu Mar 12 2026 15:27:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) by Anuj Jain

The requirement

Well, I could either type out a long description of what I wanted, or I could just point you towards the Hackers News thread that I had created after making the app. Having done that, I do still need to put something in this blog post, so here are the relevant bits -

Why - I got sick of apps abusing notifications on my Android phone. While the OS does give you the ability to switch off notifications based on channels, most apps either don’t use it or abuse it intentionally. In my case, I live in a gated society that uses an app called MyGate to allow visitors, and the app intentionally pushes ads through the same channels since you cannot block them.

What - DoNotNotify is an app that logs all incoming notifications, and displays them grouped by app. It also captures the action behind the notification, which can be triggered from the app itself. From this log, you can create rules to whitelist/blacklist notifications from apps depending on their notification content. These filters can even be regex expressions, which allows for more complicated use-cases. The app ships with some pre-defined rules for popular apps like Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, Netflix, TikTok, Reddit etc.

Building the app

Originally, I used Android Studio and the Gemini AI assistant to help me build the app. And I gotta admit, I was blown away by the experience. I have created Android apps before, including some very technical ones but this was pre-Kotlin. The Android ecosystem has changed - to the extent that I was almost clueless on what to do after creating the project. But whoa, did Gemini have a clue! I probably wrote less than 1% of the code myself. The rest of it was completely driven by prompts to the AI, which kept writing the code for me. I will say that it definitely helped to have a CS background - it would be unfair to expect a layperson to be able to do this, at least without making a ton of avoidable mistakes.

FOSS calling!

Anyhow, on the HN thread a ton of people requested (to put it politely) that an app like DoNotNotify should be open-source. Good, logical reasons were presented. And I kinda agreed! So after some dilly dallying, that’s what I did! Not going to bother copy-pasting the content from that thread here :)

Hacker News vs Product Hunt

The initial launch on HN went really well. The post hit rank #1 within a couple of hours, and stayed on the front page for more than a day.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the web analytics of the website, but I believe the visitor count was around 40k. This led to more than a thousand downloads of the app itself -

In comparison, putting the launch on Product Hunt did absolutely nothing. Not even a blip on the visit or app analytics. Granted, I didn’t go about hunting for votes to get my post upvoted, but I didn’t do that for HN either. What the PH post did get me was spam from about half a dozen websites which seemed to essentially be PH replicas. Waste of time!

Written by Anuj Jain