Have you ever received an important notification you dismissed and never found a way to see it again? It’s not surprising – Android is very good at sending us all the notifications we need, but the built-in notification log is wiped out every time your device reboots. And the idea of searching for that specific notification through every app is not practical at all.
Here’s a simple way to make sure your entire notifications history is always saved and accessible, so you won’t miss an important one again. Notifications Logger is a great app designed for this specific purpose, and I’ll explain how to install and use it below.
The app is not available in the Play Store (at least not right now), but this certainly shouldn’t stop you from trying it. Not all great apps are in the Play Store, hence the ability to sideload APKs and the plethora of Google Play app store alternatives that continue to exist.
Notifications Logger lets you store complete logs containing all your notifications but also export them so you can access this information on a different device. To install the app your phone needs to be configured to allow sideloading apps. For this, you have to enable the “Unknown sources” options in your device’s Settings ->Â “Security” (or “Lock screen and security”) if you haven’t done so already.
Now that you’re all set up you can download the APK of Notifications Logger from the link below (direct download link).
Download Notifications Logger (.APK)
When you receive the “Download complete” notification tap on it and then select the “Install” option.
After the app finishes installing, open it and it will ask you to enable a number of permissions which allow it to work properly. These permissions will vary depending on the Android version of your device. To continue tap on the “Notification access” or “Accessibility” option (also depends on your version of Android).
Enable the “Notifications Logger” option. When the popup is displayed tap on “Allow“.
The app won’t be able to show you the past notifications from before you installed it, but it will log all future ones. The log displays your notifications grouped by app and if you tap on a specific one you’ll be able to see all its notifications. Nevertheless, what Notifications Logger doesn’t allow you to do, is to interact with any of the displayed notifications (you can’t tap on a notification to open it), but at least, you can see what they were all about.
You can customize the notification log, by disabling alerts from specific apps. It makes sense you may not be interested in keeping a notifications archive from all your apps, so you can create your custom blacklist for this purpose. To do it, tap on the three-dot icon to open the options menu and select “Log notifications“.
On the following screen, you can tap on the “Apps” option which will show all your installed apps and allow you to toggle off the ones for which you don’t want notifications to be logged. Also, you can use the “Keywords” option to define specific words. If one or more of these words are contained in a notification, it won’t be logged. Of course, for any of these settings to work you also need to make sure the “Blacklist mode” option it toggled on.
Finally, Notifications Logger also provides a backup option for your notification log as well as a restore function (both of them are accessible in the app’s options menu). If you select the “Backup” option you can then copy the file located in the app’s folder and paste it on your SD card to create a backup or transfer it to a different device to import it. For the second option, you can restore the notification history on the second device by installing Notifications Logger on it, and select “Restore” in the app.
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