GNOME developers have a new application in place called Nuntius that allows users to read notifications from an Android device. It will be ready in time for the GNOME 3.16 release and it's already available in the Fedora repos.

The GNOME project is actually home to a ton of apps that don't actually have anything to do with the desktop environment. GNOME is much more than just a desktop environment, it's a collection of applications acting as a whole. It's true that no one installs all the GNOME stacks in a distro and only a small part is usually available by default, but this kind of small features really go a long way.

The ability to read notifications on a GNOME desktop from the Android phone might not seem like much, but devs don't usually do anything without a good reason. They must have suspected that it's a feature needed by many users and it sounds interesting enough to make it happen.

Now we need this feature everywhere

GNOME 3.16 will land with this particular option, so it's likely other developers will choose to make the same modifications to their desktop environments. For now, Fedora already has the desktop application in the repos and users can download the mobile app from the Google Play Store.

"Despair no more, the lobster is here to help you! Nacho, Kurt and I started a new side project called Nuntius which lets you read notifications from your android phone directly on your beautiful GNOME desktop. This is going to be even better with GNOME 3.16 and its redesigned notification system. Both the android application and the GNOME application are free software and are available on github," wrote a GNOME developer.

The notifications are sent to the phone only via Bluetooth, so nothing is stored or managed online or through insecure clouds. It's strictly a local feature that works only when the user in proximity of the PC. This feature also takes advantage of the new notification systems that is being implemented.