Hiding notification icon

Back in the days MyCarTracks app didn’t show any notification in your notification bar and was silently recording all your drives. This was great as it didn’t bloat your notification bar with another icon, but, we had to change that. If you want to know why read below. There is still a way how to hide this notification icon, but, it has some drawbacksyou will never see any notification from our app, so if the app starts recording, no notification, if there is some issue, no notification, if your employee receives job there will be no notification shown, and so on.

To hide notifications for any app you can go to the App Info screen for an app and uncheck the “Show notifications” option. There are a few ways to get to the App Info page for an app.

  1. On some launchers, you can drag the app out of the drawer, and onto an “App Info” area.
  2. Likewise, on some launchers, you can long-press the icon and an options menu comes up with “App Info”.
  3. Go to “Settings”, then “Apps”, then select the specific app you’re looking to hide notifications (and icons) from.

Let’s also take a moment to learn the reason why apps like MyCarTracks don’t have an option inside the app itself to do this!

If an app requires its notification to be displayed 100% of the time, then Android’s Garbage Collector/Process Manager is not able to automatically kill it. If, for example, MyCarTracks app allowed you to disable the notification/icon, then using that option would possibly allow Android to kill the background process without knowing that it’s important and it would stop also the Auto recording background process that is waiting until you start to drive.

Services that use Push Notifications (Like Hangouts, Email, lots of chat apps, etc) don’t need to be constantly running in the background to function. However, apps that need to do more background processing or need richer data need more than just push notifications. That’s why this is a thing.

Fortunately, disabling notifications inside the App Info screen does not affect the app’s other functionality. The app is still requesting the notification to be shown (Therefore protecting itself from getting killed) but the SystemUI App is just configured not to show it.

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