One of the most important features of mobile platforms is notifications. Our phones, and sometimes even our watches, are forever buzzing and bleeping to tell us that someone, somewhere, has done something that we should know about, right now. Whether you use iOS, Android, or even Windows Mobile, there's a common theme to these notifications: they're deeply annoying. We get notifications when we can't do anything about them, we get too many notifications, and we get notifications that we just don't care about.

This problem is just getting worse, too. Instagram users are begging their followers to turn on notifications for their accounts so that they ensure their pictures are seen in spite of the use of an algorithmic timeline. Even when we think we have our notification settings at just the right balance, an unexpected event—a tweet going viral and getting retweeted all over the Internet, say—can throw things off.

A new startup, Projector, which today announced that it had received $4.5 million in seed financing, is hoping to give mobile app developers the tools to make their notifications actually good by making them a whole lot smarter. The Projector service sits between existing application servers and the notification servers, providing a place for rules and machine learning to be applied to the notifications. There's also a client-side library for displaying and reacting to the notifications.

The idea is that notifications can be made much smarter and much less annoying. Take Twitter as an example. Most of the time, the occasional notification each time you get a retweet or a favorite is harmless. But every now and then someone with a low-traffic Twitter account has a tweet that goes viral, and whenever this happens, there are inevitably complaints a few hours or minutes later about how the account owner's phone is now useless or annoying because it's vibrating so much from all the alerts. A smarter system might detect this barrage of traffic and change to a different notification policy—perhaps batching up the alerts and sending fewer of them.

Similarly, a service like Instagram could send Projector information about the social graph of users each time it sent a like notification. A rule could inspect this graph and make decisions based on it, for example, ignoring notifications from those annoying serial likers that like virtually every picture they see or only sending alerts from people you follow.

Projector also wants to include geofencing, so notifications won't be sent while a phone's owner is driving, saving them for when the destination has been reached. They could similarly avoid meetings or other times when a buzzing phone isn't ideal.

Good for end-users, Projector also wants to make this good for developers by giving them more information about which alerts users actually do and do not care about, allowing developers to experiment with different notification strategies to improve their engagement. In the future, this could enable much more personal tailoring; a news app might learn which breaking news alerts you tap on and which ones you ignore and tailor the news it tells you about accordingly.

The company is also positioning itself as a replacement of sorts for Facebook's discontinued Parse. Hundreds of thousands of apps used the Parse platform for their back-end processing, especially for handling notifications. Facebook announced in January that it was going to turn Parse off in 2017. The source is still available for those who want to run it on their own servers, but the Facebook-hosted service is going away. Projector's service provides an alternative for any developer using Parse to handle their notifications.

Much of this work could, in principle, be done by Apple and Google. So far, the companies haven't proven interested, and it wouldn't necessarily be a great fit for cross-platform apps that would want to treat users of different platforms in much the same way, especially when their accounts may span multiple devices.

In an ideal world, every notification would be something that you care about enough to justify the intrusion that the notification implies, and you'd never pick up your phone to look at why it vibrated only to instantly dismiss it because you weren't interested. Projector may not be the total solution to this near-universal problem, but it could be a good step in the right direction. Making the endless stream of notifications that we all receive more useful and simultaneously less invasive can only be a good thing.