Out of the box, BT/notify will display notifications from the most popular communication apps. We’re ready for the most common messaging, email, calendaring, and social media apps. These choices should account for most of your communication needs.
Nonetheless, the apps might not give you all the information you need. Many apps will just notify you that you received a message. However they won’t include the text of the message in the notification. In order to really unleash BT/notify’s power, you need to configure your apps to display the whole message in the notification. Then you can see it on your car stereo screen. So, in a series of blog posts, we’ll show you how to set up common apps to give you the most benefit.
Configuring Popular Apps
It’s usually just one checkbox to allow an app to provide you the whole message in a notification. As we add more howtos, we’ll update this list:
What do I do if I don’t see my app on the list?
BT/notify can display messages from nearly any app, but we only enabled notifications from the most popular ones. Previous versions of BT/notify could scan your phone to get a list of all installed apps. However Google has since blocked that capability for security reasons. When an app creates a notification,BT/notify sees the Android package name instead of the more familiar app name. In other words, BT/notify is the app name that shows up on your launcher. However, BT/notify’s package name is net.smilinradish.android.btnotify. We used to be able to ask your phone to tell us the app name when BT/notify got a notification from a certain package.
Since that’s no longer the case we visited the Play Store to find the most popular apps and added their package names to our code. Of course, there are thousands of apps out there, so it would be impossible to add them all. That’s why we created Smart App Addition for BT/notify 3.0.
How smart is Smart App Addition?
The first time an app generates a notification, BT/notify will see that notification and it will get its package name. So, we would see something like net.smilinradish.android.btnotify. While that is a bit of a mouthful, it’s pretty obvious that that package is indeed BT/notify. BT/notify will automatically add net.smilinradish.android.btnotify to the list of apps, but will not start sending its notifications to your stereo until you select Choose Apps and click the checkbox by your app. Of course, you’ll probably want to give your app a better name than net.smilinradish.android.btnotify, so you can click on the Custom App Names button and set the name to something more readable like BT/notify or The Greatest App Ever.
