Developers come up with app for displaying Android notifications on Linux

Developers have created a tool with which Android notifications, such as from WhatsApp, can be displayed in the Gnome desktop environment. The tool consists of two programs, which communicate with each other via bluetooth.

The developers have named the project Nuntius. This allows Gnome users to push notifications shown in Android to the desktop. The desktop program is written for Gnome, but after installing some necessary packages it also works with, for example, KDE or Xfce.

The necessary Nuntius tools for pushing messages to Gnome are available through GitHub. The Linux distro Fedora is the first to already offer the desktop program in its software libraries. Most likely, more distributions will follow in due course. Finally, the Android app is already in the Google Play Store and runs on version 4.3 and higher.

Nuntius works by means of bluetooth, with which, for example, WhatsApp messages can be pushed from the phone to the desktop. “This is not only a technology choice, but also a design choice. Notifications are only sent to the PC that is nearby. Messages therefore remain local and private, and thus will not be sent to ‘the cloud’,” the developers said.

There are also programs in circulation for Windows and OS X that can do the same thing as Nuncio. Pushbullet can be used to send messages to those operating systems. An update recently appeared for that program, which makes it possible to answer messages directly.