Filtrate - Notification Filter

Your phone is an amazing device to make yourself accessible. It's a shame you keep it on silent all the time. Filtrate is a smart filter which silences notifications that are not important to you. It allows you to be accessible but not distracted.

The goal of Filtrate is to allow you to leave your ringer on without it constantly distracting you.

How does it work?
During a filtration session (while the filter is enabled), Filtrate combines machine learning and several heuristics to classify your notifications as either urgent, spam and normal.

Urgent notifications are shown and play your ringtone. Normal notifications are saved for your review when you finish your filtration session. Spam notifications are hidden entirely.

Machine Learning
We use a Bernoulli Naive Bayes text classification algorithm which is commonly used for spam detection and is particularly effective for small text documents like notifications. If you're interested, read more about it here.

When you finish a filtration session and review non-urgent notifications you can swipe left and right to mark a notification as urgent or spam.

The machine learning filter only considers the last 500 notifications so your filter stays relevant.

Heuristics
The most powerful heuristic Filtrate uses is @username. When you receive a notification with @yourusername it will automatically be treated as urgent. This makes it easy for people to flag messages as important.

If you mark 2 notifications with exactly identical content as urgent or spam, Filtrate will treat any future identical notifications as urgent or spam. This is an effective way to handle automatic notifications.

You can long press a notification while reviewing to mark all notifications from that app as urgent. This is useful for business apps such as Hipchat or your work calendar.

Developer's note:

I use Filtrate everyday to manage my incoming notifications. Filtrate knows that Hipchat notifications are from work and Facebook Messenger notifications can wait. My friends know I use the app and use @matt to reach me if something is urgent.

Before using Filtrate, I would keep my phone on silent. I'd miss phone calls and important messages. Now whenever my phone buzzes I'm actually excited to look because I know it's going to be something I care about.

I've also noticed my phone battery lasts longer now that I only turn on the screen when I actually have an important notification.

I hope Filtrate de-clutters your inbox and frees you as much as it has me! I would love to hear any feedback at any time!