Desktop Notifications for Android

Desktop Notifications has been discontinued on February 28, 2019.

All good things come to an end. Desktop Notifications was initially created as a student project in 2012. Since then, the app has been downloaded almost 600,000 times and billions of notifications were sent to desktops around the world.

• Why is this happening? Last year, multiple things came together that eventually led to our choice to discontinue Desktop Notifications. The human-computer interaction group at the University of Stuttgart split and moved to the University of Munich and the University of Regensburg, with only a few people remaining in Stuttgart. Additionally, Google announced the plans to discontinue Google+ for consumers (including the Google+ APIs) and Google Cloud Messaging (GCM), the latter which powers the actual distribution of push events. While replacements for the Google+ sign-in and GCM exist, switching to them would require a complete rewrite of most components of Desktop Notifications.
• What will happen? We will roll out final updates for the Android app and Chrome extension. The updates will remove all functionality from the app/extension and will allow you to uninstall them with a single click. Server-side account and device data will be deleted. You can optionally revoke the Google account authentication by visiting this page. If you have questions, please feel free to contact us at [email protected].

Thank you for using Desktop Notifications.

The hciLab team

Alternative Apps

Please find a list of alternative apps and services below (listed in alphabetical order). We are not affiliated with any of these services.

• AirDroid
• Join by joaoapps
• KDE Connect
• Microsoft "Your Phone"
• MightyText
• Pushbullet
• Samsung Flow

Timeline

• November 2012
  Initial release of the Android app in the Google Play Store with support for Android 2.2 - 4.0.
  Initial release of the Chrome extension in the Chrome Web Store.
• July 2013
  Desktop Notifications is featured on Lifehacker.
  Support for Chrome's Rich Desktop Notifications and the Notification Center.
• August 2013
  Initial release of the Firefox add-on.
  Support for the Android Notification Listener API on Android 4.3+.
• May 2014
  The paper "Large-Scale Assessment of Mobile Notifications" (PDF) is presented at the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2014).
• October 2014
  Desktop Notifications is featured in the German computer magazine c't (circulation ~330,000).
• Fall 2014
  Development of "version 2":
  • Connecting devices with a single click using Google account authentication.
  • Switch to using Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) in the backend to deliver push events.
  • Support for synchronizing notifications between Android devices.
  • Support for dismissing notifications across all connected devices at once.
• Spring 2015
  Full roll-out of "version 2".
  Redesign of the Android app according to the Material Design best practices.
• 2017
  The Android app passes 500,000 downloads in the Google Play Store.
• 2018
  Google announces the deprecation of Google+ and Google Cloud Messaging (GCM).
  The hciLab group at the University of Stuttgart splits and moves to the University of Munich and the University of Regensburg.
• February 2019
  Desktop Notifications is discontinued.

Statistics

---

Updates Released between 2012 and 2018

---

User Ratings out of 5 stars

Acknowledgements

Desktop Notifications was developed and maintained by Dominik Weber. The project would not have been possible without the support of the University of Stuttgart, the SimTech Cluster of Excellence, and the hciLab group led by Prof. Dr. Albrecht Schmidt and Prof. Dr. Niels Henze. Special thanks go to Dr. Alireza Sahami Shirazi.

Future Updates

If you would like to be informed about new and updated apps related to Desktop Notifications for Android, please enter your email address and opt-in to receiving emails by selecting "Yes." You can also leave an optional comment. We will keep your email address confidential and promise not to spam you. You can edit your response after submitting the form.

Sign up for email updates