How to handle other app notifications in react native on Android or iPhone?

Question

Is it possible to get the notifications from other apps on my iPhone (or Android, for this matter) and process them in my app? Do I need to write this app in my native language (Swift or Kotlin), or can I utilize React Native for it?

Answer 1

For android you can use NotificationListenerService.

Example:

import { AppRegistry } from 'react-native'
import RNAndroidNotificationListener, { RNAndroidNotificationListenerHeadlessJsName } from 'react-native-android-notification-listener';

// To check if the user has permission
const status = await RNAndroidNotificationListener.getPermissionStatus()
console.log(status) // Result can be 'authorized', 'denied' or 'unknown'

// To open the Android settings so the user can enable it
RNAndroidNotificationListener.requestPermission()

/**
 * Note that this method MUST return a Promise.
 * Is that why I'm using an async function here.
 */
const headlessNotificationListener = async ({ notification }) => {/**
     * This notification is a JSON string in the follow format:
     *  {
     *      "time": string,
     *      "app": string,
     *      "title": string,
     *      "titleBig": string,
     *      "text": string,
     *      "subText": string,
     *      "summaryText": string,
     *      "bigText": string,
     *      "audioContentsURI": string,
     *      "imageBackgroundURI": string,
     *      "extraInfoText": string,
     *      "groupedMessages": Array<Object> [
     *          {
     *              "title": string,
     *              "text": string
     *          }
     *      ],
     *      "icon": string (base64),
     *      "image": string (base64), // WARNING! THIS MAY NOT WORK FOR SOME APPLICATIONS SUCH TELEGRAM AND WHATSAPP
     *  }
     * 
     * Note that these properties depend on the sender configuration so many times a lot of them will be empty
     */
    
    if (notification) {
        /**
         * You could store the notifications in an external API.
         * I'm using AsyncStorage in the example project.
         */
        
        ...
    }
}

/**
 * This should be required early in the sequence
 * to make sure the JS execution environment is setup before other
 * modules are required.
 * 
 * Your entry file (index.js) would be the better place for it.
 * 
 * PS: I'm using here the constant RNAndroidNotificationListenerHeadlessJsName to ensure
 *     that I register the headless with the right name
 */
AppRegistry.registerHeadlessTask(RNAndroidNotificationListenerHeadlessJsName,   () => headlessNotificationListener)

or

Apple transfers notifications securely. Plus notifications are tied to only one app by encryption, that means that there is no way to intercept notifications