NEWS – Notify for Smartwatches can elevate no-name smartwatches to a new level.
I just reviewed two smartwatches back to back and both were brand names you probably don’t know. Those reviews will appear soon.
The major problem with both watches was zero customize-ability to the vibrations they deliver. If you don’t notice one, single, vibration from a text or app thanks to the manufacturer deciding one vibe is enough, then what good is the watch? ‘Wow, that was an emergency text. Too bad I missed it?’
One of the watches I reviewed carries claims that it delivers notifications from any app on your phone. In reality it only gave notifications from a subset of my apps. Oops?!
I mainly need a smartwatch to deliver reliable, silent notifications. Smartwatches under $100 usually don’t report accurate heart rates during intense exercise, and several have lots of ‘sport modes’, that really only track time, heart rate (see above) and give an expended calorie estimation, whether ‘Shooting’, ‘Fishing’ or playing ‘Football’ or ‘Tennis’. Some low-end smartwatches are just not useful as athletic activity trackers.
So I rely on my smartwatches for silent notifications when I’m in committee meetings, Zoom calls, restaurants, professional offices, church, etc. and still need to be connected.
After submitting my two watch reviews I was pondering, there has to be a solution to the smartwatch minimal notifications problem. I remembered an app from long ago when I had a Wear OS watch. That app is still available but only works with Wear OS.
I started researching and voila, enter ‘Notify for Smartwatches’. ‘Notify’ allows for multiple vibrations from any and all apps on your phone. I was beside myself at how well the app worked with my two watches.
The developer says the app works with every brand of smartwatch. You may have a Casio, Withings, Garmin, Samsung, TicWatch, or Fossil. Notify for Smartwatches should work with it. But if you have a Haylou, Umidigi, Honor, KOSPET, Oukitel, or any other brand of smartwatch, you’re probably in luck too.
There is a free, lite version of Notify for Smartwatches you can use to test how the app works with your watch. I spent the $3.49 for the Pro version after just 15 minutes of testing the lite version.
There is a bit of a learning curve and some of the terminology in the app is not immediately intuitive, but with some experimentation and help from app Support, both my sub-$100 smartwatches now operate in a category well above their market positions. The developer thought of just about everything. This app is deep but works well.
You can set ‘Reminders’ too. I set a vibration Reminder to be my wake up alarm. It does not rely on the watch or phone clock apps. I set it to vibe 4 times every 15 seconds for a minute between 5:50AM and 5:51AM, and it works. The vibes may not be completely evenly synchronized as I expected but I get the right number of them over a minute and no alert has failed to deliver yet. Thanks to Notify, I have awakened when I needed to since finding this app.
I set one Reminder to be an hourly ‘chime’ via vibration. I have it set to vibe on the hour from 6AM to 10PM. It vibes 10 seconds past exact ‘on the hour’, but that’s no problem to me.
Information about Notify for Smartwatches is at https://bandnotify.com/
Notify for Smartwatches is available for Android phones only, so it is available at the Google Play Store.
