How to See All Messages from Social Apps In One App on Android

We have friends and associates scattered all around our social networks. While some reach us through WhatsApp and text messages, others use Twitter and Facebook. And if you have a team on Slack, that makes a third set of people.

Android throws notifications from them in the app drawer just as someone tries to reach you. While reading these incoming messages one by one using different apps is not too big a deal, wouldn’t it still be wonderful if you could read all the incoming messages from these apps under a single app?

Snowball For Android

Snowball is an interesting app for Android that is working to make that possible. The app is currently in beta, and it unifies all the notifications from your messaging apps like WhatsApp, text messages, and Facebook Messenger all in one place. The app works like an aggregator in which all the information is gathered from the incoming notifications of the individual apps and expressed in a summarized manner under a single app.

The app is currently limited to only US users, but when has that stopped a Guiding Tech reader.. just use Hola and get the app without any problem. After you install the app, it will give you an interactive guide on how to use it.

Basically, you will see a cute little snowball on the screen that will stay hidden until a message is received or it’s triggered manually. After you tap on the Snowball, it will show your recent messages from all the messaging applications supported by the app.

You can read all the messages directly from the Snowball app. If you have more than one message from the same contact, it will be wrapped up and you can expand it to read it.  Snowball currently supports Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, SMS, Hangouts, Twitter, Line, WeChat, and Slack with more apps coming soon.

Cool Tip: In the Snowball configuration settings, you can configure some basic options as to how the app should appear on the lock screen. If you don’t want all the apps to show under Snowball, individual apps can be disabled here.

Limitations

With Snowball, your unified inbox is limited to receiving and reading the messages only. If you wish to reply to any of the messages, that will have to be done the same old fashioned way.

When you tap on a message to reply, Snowball opens up the respective messaging app from which you can send your response. However, the good thing is that Snowball can be accessed from any app, so if you want to read another message, you don’t have to go back to the home screen every time to do that.

If you decide to use the Snowball app, it would be best for you to disable the notifications from individual apps or you might get redundant reminders each time someone pings you on WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. If you don’t want to dig into the advanced settings of each program, you can disable notifications at the system level by deactivating them from App Settings.

Conclusion

So that was how you can get all your notifications from messaging applications unified under a single app. The app is still in its beta stage and we might see lots of improvement in the future release. In the meantime, try out the app and tell us what you love or hate about it.