One of the things I’ve always sort of disliked about the iOS & iPadOS notification experience is that once you open a notification, it disappears for good. It runs contrary to how it feels to archive an email you’ve already read and then still be able to search for that email thread again in the future. In some ways, I wish I could do the same with my smartphone notifications.
While Apple certainly hasn’t implemented such a function into iOS or iPadOS, iOS developer Antoine is happy to answer that call with a new jailbreak tweak called Senri.
To put it simply, Senri saves a running record of all your past incoming notifications and then archives them even after they’ve been opened and read. In essence, this makes a searchable notification record so that you can quickly and easily find notifications that you might be trying to find.
To use Senri, you can simply navigate to the Notifications cell in the Settings app, or visit the Senri preference pane, and you’ll find yourself with a search interface like the one shown above where you can view all past notifications, sort them by specific criteria, or search for keywords using a traditional search bar.
Senri also intelligently stores important metadata about notifications that can help you in your search. Those metadata include:
- The title of the notification
- The sub-title of the notification
- The content of the notification
- The date of the notification
- The Bundle ID or Application ID of the notification
- Any attachments associated with the notification
Once installed, the tweak adds a dedicated preference pane to the Settings app where you can turn the tweak on or off on demand and find a place to search for your previously received notifications:
Just to remind, you can also visit Settings → Notifications and find a Senri cell to search for previously received notifications there as well:
Personally, I find that Senri is a powerful jailbreak tweak that I’ve long wanted and didn’t even know I wanted. There’ve been tons of instances where when talking with someone, I mention something they sent to me in text, and they refute that they ever said it. With Senri, I can easily search my notification archives to prove them wrong or remind them that they did indeed say something they didn’t remember saying.
I can also use Senri to search for notifications that I’ve accidentally marked as read, because iOS usually doesn’t offer second chances for those types of instances.
If Senri sounds like something you’d like to take advantage of, then you can purchase the tweak for $1.49 from the Chariz repository via your favorite package manager app. The tweak supports jailbroken iOS & iPadOS 14.0-17.x devices and works with the Serotonin “semi-jailbreak” for the RootHide development team’s Procursus-based bootstrap.
Are you going to be taking advantage of Senri and the functionality that it brings to the table? Let us know why or why not in the comments section down below.
