InstMsg Monitor

Omer Zak

Contains ads

About this app

InstMsg Monitor turns your phone into a high-impact alerting device for the WhatsApp and Telegram messages that actually matter to you. Pick the contacts and groups you never want to miss — a child, a partner, a doctor, an on-call rotation, a school — and the app fires a custom local alert the moment they message you: a notification, a vibration pattern, and a flashlight (torch) flash you can configure per contact.

Designed with deaf, hard-of-hearing, and heavy-sleeper users in mind, but useful for anyone who wants a louder, more physical signal for the few inbound messages that genuinely matter.

HOW IT WORKS

Once you grant Notification Access (a one-tap step the app guides you through), a small foreground service watches the notifications WhatsApp and Telegram already produce. When a message comes in, the service matches the sender against your monitored-contact list and — only on a match — fires the alert you configured for that contact. Senders you have not added are silently ignored.

KEY FEATURES

• Per-contact alert profiles — vibration on/off, torch on/off, torch duration in milliseconds, optional custom alert text.
• Pattern matching — type the first letters of a contact's name (or a star-wildcard pattern). The first matching message binds the row to that exact sender automatically; you never have to know the spelling, capitalization, or emoji decoration the sender uses.
• Verbatim mode — once bound, the row matches that one sender exactly, with no false positives from look-alikes.
• Two messengers — WhatsApp and Telegram, kept on separate lists so the same name (e.g. "Mom") can have different alert profiles per app.
• JSONL import / export — share a contact list with another phone via Android's standard share sheet, or import from a text file.
• Notification deduplication — the same message arriving twice within two seconds fires the alert exactly once.
• Filter-overlap detection — if two of your patterns happen to match the same sender, the app warns you so you can fix the duplicate.
• Auto-restart after reboot — the alert service is back online before you even unlock the phone.
• Hebrew and English UI.

PRIVACY

InstMsg Monitor is a privacy-first app. Everything runs on your device:

• Notifications are read in-process to match the sender against your local list, then immediately discarded if no match. The message preview is never stored, never displayed in the alert, and never transmitted off the device.
• Camera permission is used solely for the flashlight (CameraManager.setTorchMode). The app contains no code paths to take photos or record video.
• No analytics, no ads SDK, no crash reporter, no third-party tracking. There is no backend server. Outbound network traffic is two read-only HTTPS GETs from a publisher host — an ad page on the main screen and a help page in the Help screen.
• Local storage is your contact list and per-contact alert preferences only. Uninstalling the app removes everything.

PERMISSIONS REQUESTED

• Notification access — to read WhatsApp / Telegram notifications you choose to monitor (you grant this from Settings).
• Camera — to flash the torch as part of an alert (only if you enable the torch).
• Notifications (POST_NOTIFICATIONS) — to show the foreground status notification and the per-message alerts.
• Vibrate — to vibrate the device on alert.
• Foreground service / boot completion — to keep the alert pipeline alive between reboots.

RELIABILITY

• Foreground service with a low-importance status notification you can hide.
• Self-healing: if the system tears down the listener, the next inbound notification re-spawns the alert pipeline.
• Heartbeat logging makes service liveness diagnosable from logcat without instrumenting the app.

InstMsg Monitor — because some messages deserve a flash of light, not just a buzz on a silent phone.

What’s new

First release.