Years Later, I Miss My Phone’s Notification LED

I had used the notification LED for years until I got a Galaxy S21 FE, which dropped it in favor of an Always on Display. AOD failed to impress me, and while I still miss the notification LED, I’ve gotten a worthy replacement that keeps the notification LED flame burning brighter than ever.

The Notification LED Allowed Me to See New Notifications Without Turning on My Phone

I don’t like checking my phone every few minutes to see if a new and shiny notification is waiting for me on the lock screen. When I’m out and about alone, I can just hear incoming pings on my wireless buds since I always wear them when not with someone.

When working, especially with headphones on, that’s harder, but with a notification LED, it was seamless. A quick glance at my phone now and again was all that was needed to see whether I’d got a new chat message or someone had invaded my base in my latest mobile addiction.

When gaming at night, a quick glance would notify me that my partner had trouble falling asleep, sending me memes until she dozed off with her phone in her hands. The LED was helpful when hanging out with friends, too, since I usually set my phone to silent when chilling with someone.

The tiny, brightly lit dot made me cut the number of times I checked my phone out of habit immensely. But then I got a Galaxy S21 FE, and while I love the phone, I don’t like the fact that it lacks the notification LED like most other phones that came out in the last half a decade or so.

The S21 FE instead has the latest feature made to show you notifications without having to turn the screen on manually, Always on Display. But AOD is kind of a dud, at least on my phone.

Always on Display Is a Subpar Notification LED Replacement

Since AOD was the only way to see notifications without manually turning on the display, naturally, I tried to use it. But I ended up not liking it.

The first reason was the battery drain. Yes, AOD isn’t that harsh on battery life, but when your phone’s weakest point is its battery life—the S21 FE has middling to flat-out disappointing battery life—AOD only makes it worse.

Next, I don’t know about you, but I always have at least a couple of persistent notifications active. For example, there’s one for the step counter. When a new update arrives, the notification lingers in my status bar for at least a couple of days (usually a week or longer, to be honest) before I get bothered to install it. This makes seeing new alert icons quite difficult, especially with a quick glance that doesn’t last more than half a second.

And while I can set AOD to turn on only on arrival of new notifications, I still have to turn my screen on to check them manually because I can’t discern which app is trying to get my attention since the icons are tiny and there are always at least a couple of them showing on AOD at once.

Enter aodNotify, an awesome find that solved my issues stemming from the lack of a notification LED, and then some.

aodNotify Gave My LED-less Phone a Notification LED—and Then Some

When I realized I wouldn’t use AOD, I embarked on a search for a replacement that would bring back at least part of the magic of the notification LED. I had tried a couple of apps before I stumbled upon aodNotify.

While the primary function of this app, at least on paper, is to offer a highly customizable Always on Display feature, the thing that won me over was its notification LED emulation feature that rocks an equally robust customization system.

The notification LED replacement I settled on is a LED-like ring placed around the front-facing camera that lights up when you get a new notification. While that sounds nice, it gets even better.

You can customize the color of the ring on an app-by-app basis. I can set one color for my Gmail alerts, another color for Slack messages, set a unique color for each chat app I use, and even assign colors to games and other apps capable of bombarding my phone with pings if I feel like it. Or I can just block certain apps from activating the notification ring in the first place, so unless the LED is showing, I don’t have to pick up my phone at all.

If the app is worthy of being assigned a color, depending on the color, I know whether I should check the incoming alert right away or not. If it’s a lilac ring, I probably should because my partner is messaging me. If the light’s green, that’s a Gmail email, which I can ignore until I’ve time to check it. If I see an orange-lit LED, that’s a Slack message, so I should check that one out sooner rather than later.

Suppose you liked your old phone’s notification LED but wanted something flashier-looking. In that case, you can set aodNotify to light up the screen edges instead of activating a circle around the selfie camera. You can even use an LED-like dot in the status bar for a true-to-life notification LED emulation. Customizations don’t stop there.

You can select how long the light will show, pick between more than a dozen light effects, change the dimensions of the light and its position, and much more. If you prefer AOD over the notification LED, you can use it instead and customize it to your liking thanks to a slew of customization options that eclipse the level of customization of the AOD feature provided by Samsung.

The only downside of aodNotify is that the app occasionally fails to activate the LED when you get a new notification. It happens fairly rarely (about 1 in 10 notifications fail to show, possibly even less often), but it does happen. This doesn’t bother me personally, but if you need to be aware of every new alert on your phone, you should probably skip this app.

While I still miss the physical notification LED, aodNotify is the replacement I’ve been dreaming of. Not only does it provide a great notification LED replacement, but it also makes said concept better than ever with its slew of customization options. It’s not perfect, but it’s just what I was looking for after I realized my current phone lacks a notification LED.