Forward Android app notifications to Slack, email or a webhook

2026-09-12

For years "get it off the phone" meant SMS forwarding. That is no longer enough. Your bank confirms a transfer with a push notification. The courier's app tells you the parcel is ten minutes away. The payment terminal's app reports a settlement. None of that is an SMS, and none of it reaches anyone who is not holding the phone.

Android has a mechanism for this — an app can be granted notification access and see the notifications other apps post. Pushferry uses it to forward the notifications you choose to the places you already watch: Slack, Discord, email, Telegram, a webhook, or another phone.

What gets forwarded, exactly

A notification has a title, a body and the name of the app that posted it. That is what is forwarded — the same text you would see if you pulled down the shade. Pushferry does not read the app's screen, does not tap anything in it, and cannot see what the app does not put into a notification. If your bank shows the amount in the notification, you get the amount; if it only says "You have a new message", that is what you get.

Because it is per-app, you decide which apps are included. Tick your bank and the courier; leave your messenger and your games alone.

Setup

1. Pair the phone with your Pushferry account (see the SMS-to-Slack guide for the first steps — the pairing is the same). 2. On the phone's main screen, switch on Notification forwarding. The app first explains what it will read and then sends you to Android's notification-access setting; allow Pushferry there and come back. 3. Tap the row to choose apps. Popular banking and delivery apps are pre-listed; anything else installed on the phone can be added from the full list. 4. In the web dashboard, create a forwarding rule as usual — destination and filters. Notification text goes through the same rules as SMS, so a keyword filter for "transfer" or a sender filter for the bank's app name works the same way.

From then on a matching notification is forwarded within seconds of appearing on the phone.

Where the text goes

Notifications are dispatched from the phone itself to Slack, Discord, webhooks and the like. The content does not pass through Pushferry's servers for those destinations; the cloud keeps a delivery log (which app, when, whether it succeeded) so you can see that the rule is working. For email, Pushferry's mail server relays the text in memory without storing it — a phone cannot send trustworthy email on its own.

Notification access is a sensitive permission, and it should be treated as one: Pushferry asks for it only when you switch the feature on, reads only the apps you ticked, and the whole feature can be turned off with one switch on the main screen.

Two things this is good for that SMS forwarding is not

Apps that abandoned SMS. Many European banks now confirm payments only in their own app. If you keep a business SIM in a spare phone for a shared account, notification forwarding is the only way the team sees those confirmations.

Shop and delivery systems. Point-of-sale apps, food-delivery partner apps, and marketplace seller apps all notify the phone rather than sending email. Forwarding those to a Slack channel gives the whole team the "new order" ping without everyone installing the app.

What it will not do

It cannot reply, tap "accept", or open the app — it only reads what is displayed. It cannot see notifications the app never posts (silent updates, badges). And on some phones the notification-access grant is reset by a system update; if forwarding stops, the app's status screen will tell you the access was lost and where to re-enable it.

Webhooks: building on it

For a webhook destination the phone posts a small JSON body: sender (the app's name) and text (the notification's title and body). That is enough to turn "bank notification arrived" into a row in a spreadsheet, a message in your own system, or a trigger in n8n or Make. The API docs describe the payload.