Organize Your Android Notifications by Color Coding Them

Notifications are mundane and bland, designed to be functional rather than beautiful. For users with dozens of apps frequently pushing notifications, this could result in important information getting lost in an endless stream of visually-similar popups. Color coding notifications fixes this problem by making them eye-catching and easier to distinguish at a glance.

Whether you’ve tweaked your device’s basic settings, modded your home launcher and icons, or gone as far as to fully root your phone, you’ve no doubt made use of Android’s abundant customization options.

Read More: 6 Android Hacks that Will Turn you into an Android God

Luckily, you don’t need to be a tech pro to change the look and feel of your device. Thanks to the hundreds of customization apps available in the Google Play Store, almost every aspect of your Android phone can be modified to fit your personality without needing root access — a process that not only could “brick” or ruin your phone, but void its warranty.

Step 1: Install Notify BETA

Notify BETA, from developer Skytek65, is a free app that turns bland, basic notifications into colorful and dynamic messages that display in the upper portion of your screen. When a notification is received, a bubble, color-coded to correspond with the source, will pop up and expand, displaying the message.

Step 2: Install HeadsOff

If you’re running Android version 5.0 (Lollipop) or above, you will need to install HeadsOff before configuring your Notify preferences. This app disables your phone’s native “heads up” style notification, allowing Notify to replace them with their custom design.

Android version 6.0 (Marshmallow) must manually disable peaking for each individual app by going to Settings, Sound and Notification, App Notifications, and then selecting each app and toggling off “allow peaking.”

You can check your system version by going to your system settings, scrolling down to the bottom, and selecting “about phone.”

Step 3: Set up your Notify preferences

After disabling stock notifications, switching on color-coded notifications is easy. Launch Notify and follow the simple tutorial to grant the app access to your notifications. It’s that simple.

Since the app is currently still in beta, there aren’t any settings yet. Although notifications work with every app, some might not be fully optimized.