We have friends and associates scattered throughout our social networks. While some contact us through WhatsApp and text messages, others use Twitter and Facebook. And if you have a team on Slack, it’s a third person group.
Android throws notifications from them into the app drawer as soon as someone tries to contact you. While reading each of these incoming messages using different apps isn’t too big of a deal, wouldn’t it be great if you could read all incoming messages from these apps in a single app?
Snowball for Android
Snowball is a cool app for Android that is working to make that a reality. The app is currently in beta and it consolidates all the notifications from your messaging apps like WhatsApp, text messages and Facebook Messenger, all in one place. The app acts like an aggregator, where all the information is collected from the incoming notifications of individual apps and presented as a summary in one app.
The app is currently limited to US users, but the Tech Guide reader has since stopped working.. just use Hola and get the app without any issues. After you install the app, it will give you an interactive tutorial on how to use it.
Basically, you will see a cute little snowball on the screen that will stay hidden until a message is received or it is manually activated. After you tap Snowball, it will show your recent messages from all the messaging apps supported by the app.
You can read all messages directly from the Snowball app. If you have more than one message from the same contact, it will be wrapped and you can expand the message to read. Snowball currently supports Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, SMS, Hangouts, Twitter, Line, WeChat and Slack with more apps coming soon.
Cool Tip: In the Snowball configuration settings, you can configure some basic options for how apps will appear on the lock screen. If you don’t want all apps to show up in Snowball, you can disable individual apps here.
Limit
With Snowball, your unified inbox is limited to receiving and reading messages only. If you want to reply to any messages, that will have to be done the old fashioned way.
When you tap on a message to reply, Snowball opens the corresponding messaging app so you can send your response. The good thing, though, is that Snowball can be accessed from any app, so if you want to read another message, you don’t have to go back to the home screen every time to do it.
If you decide to use the Snowball app, it’s best to turn off notifications from individual apps, otherwise you might get redundant reminders every time someone pings you on WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. If you don’t want to delve into the advanced settings of each program, you can disable notifications at the system level by disabling them from Install apps.
Conclusion
So that’s how you can get all your notifications from messaging apps consolidated in a single app. The app is still in beta and we could see many improvements in a future release. In the meantime, try the app and let us know what you like or hate about it.
Bottom image credit: Jared and Corin
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
