Smart Island

A lightweight, privacy-first Android overlay that shows notifications, media, calls and more around your camera cutout.

What it is • What it does • Screenshots • Privacy • Build • Community

What it is

Smart Island puts a small pill around your camera cutout or status bar. Notifications, music, calls, charging, timers and navigation show up in it, and a tap opens each one into a card. When nothing is going on, a clock, the weather, your net speed or the next alarm take turns in the same spot.

Everything happens on your device. There is no account, no analytics and no cloud.

What it does

Notifications and live activities

Notifications show up as a small pill and open into a card with the app icon, the message and its action buttons. You can reply inline, and a half-typed reply is kept if a call or something else takes over the island. Alerts from the same app are grouped into one card with a small bubble to flip between them, and pictures in a notification open in steps from a preview to full size.

Other things it picks up and shows:

• Music with album art, a wavy seek bar and track controls
• Calls, including WhatsApp, Telegram and other VoIP calls, with a call timer
• Timers and stopwatches from Google, Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo and Huawei clock apps, with pause, resume and laps
• Navigation with the next turn, distance left and ETA
• Rides and deliveries from Uber, Swiggy, Zomato, Blinkit, Rapido and Ola
• Downloads, uploads, backups, file copies and app installs with live speed and time left
• System events like charging, low battery, battery saver, Wi-Fi, VPN, Bluetooth (with earbud battery), USB, headphones, hotspot, flashlight and screen or audio recording

There are about 30 events and each has its own switch. Portrait and landscape can be set separately.

Idle widgets

When nothing is going on, the cutout rotates through small widgets you pick: clock, date, weather, wind, battery, next alarm, net speed, unread count and Do Not Disturb. Tapping one opens more detail. The date widget shows your next calendar event, and the weather one can list rain chance, humidity, UV, air quality, sunrise and sunset and the next few hours.

Some details worth knowing:

• The pill does a small tick on the hour, and sunrise, noon, sunset and midnight each get their own glyph.
• Weather uses your location or a city you choose, Open-Meteo by default, or your own compatible service.
• Net speed only shows when traffic is above a threshold you set, can be limited to Wi-Fi or mobile data, and keeps a daily usage count.
• You can hide or show widgets during work hours, at night or while charging, drag them into your own order and pin one to always come first.
• The tick can be smooth or drawn on a little LED board in red, amber, green or white.

Unlock animation

When you unlock the phone, a face scan animation plays over the cutout, with a fingerprint version for finger unlocks and app locks. This one is still being built in phases.

Gestures

The collapsed pill takes swipes in all four directions, so you can skip a track, cycle notifications or clear them without opening it. On an expanded card you can tap to open the app, swipe up to dismiss, hold and swipe up to clear everything, or swipe down for a floating window or the notification shade. Every direction can be remapped or turned off, and sensitivity and haptic strength are adjustable. There is a gesture guide with a small playground to try them.

Quick launch

A launcher window opens from the island with pinned apps, recents and a utilities grid. The grid has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, hotspot, airplane mode, dark mode, flashlight, calculator, timer, stopwatch, screenshot, screen and voice recorders, camera and clear cache, plus resizable app widgets. Floating windows use Android's own freeform mode, or LMO Freeform if your ROM has it.

Looks and layout

The app is built with Material 3, so settings, switches and dialogs match the rest of Android, and colours can follow your wallpaper with Material You on Android 12 and up.

• Size, position and corner radius are set separately for portrait and landscape, with presets for a centre hole, corner hole, wide island or compact pill.
• A top-docked notch mode sits flush against the edge, and the companion bubble can go on the left or right.
• Custom colours and opacity, custom fonts (any TTF or OTF), or a mix of up to three fonts by weight.
• Animation speed presets, plus a landscape lab to preview how the island behaves when you rotate.
• A settings search, and backup and restore to a file.

Notification control

• Cooldown for apps that send bursts of alerts, and background sync pings are ignored.
• Do Not Disturb and Android modes are respected.
• Per-app rules for showing, sound or hiding, and an exempt list that switches the island off in games or video.
• Lock screen presets: everything, messages only, calls only or off.
• Privacy dots for camera, mic, location and screen sharing, like Android's own, and a tap shows which app.
• A local, searchable history of past notifications that never leaves the phone.

Staying alive

Shizuku can set up the awkward permissions in one tap. There are tips for Xiaomi, Samsung, OnePlus, Oppo, Huawei, Vivo, Asus and Nubia so the system does not kill the service, and a baseline profile helps keep animations smooth. Tap the version seven times to unlock developer mode with diagnostics and log export.

Languages

Smart Island is translated into Spanish, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese in addition to English.

Translations live in app/src/main/res/values-<locale>/. If you would like to help translate into another language or polish existing phrases, see CONTRIBUTING.md. An automated helper script is included at scripts/translate_strings.py powered by LibreTranslate.

Screenshots

Privacy & permissions

Smart Island asks for what it needs to do its job and nothing more:

• Overlay and notification access to draw the island and read alerts, media and timers.
• Foreground service and battery optimisation so Android keeps it alive.
• Usage access, Shizuku (optional) for one-tap setup and the privacy indicator app inspector.
• Calendar, location and Bluetooth only for the widgets that use them: next event, weather, and earbud battery.
• Internet only for the update check you choose to run and the weather lookup. No notification content ever leaves the device.

More in PRIVACY.md and SECURITY.md. You can also check a build on VirusTotal or follow the public CI runs.

Building from source

You need the Android SDK (API 26 to 36), JDK 17 and the bundled Gradle wrapper.

git clone https://github.com/agupta07505/SmartIsland.git
cd SmartIsland
./gradlew assembleDebug
adb install -r app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk

On Windows use gradlew.bat. Tests and lint run with ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest lintDebug.

It is written in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose and Material 3, uses Hilt for injection, and keeps settings in DataStore and history in SQLite.

Community

Come say hi on Telegram. Plans live in ROADMAP.md, history in CHANGELOG.md, and contributions are welcome, see CONTRIBUTING.md and the code of conduct.

License

Smart Island is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.
Copyright (C) 2026 Animesh Gupta.