Pinnit

Pinnit started from a very simple idea.

We constinuously create reminders in apps and alarms, but what if you fixed it to the panel you open dozens or maybe hundreds of times a day. And since we're there, why not extend that behavior to all notifications?

Our problems were cut out for us; there are too many notifications these days, and it's easy to miss important ones. Android has a notification log, but if you accidentally dismiss a notification unknowingly, you’d never think to check it. It also has notification snoozing, which is somewhat useful, but it's not even enabled by default.

Pinnit works by reading and recreating your notifications as fixed notifications. Fixed notifications cannot be dismissed with gestures and must be removed through a trigger, whether user-facing or not.

This works because, with a special permission provided by the user, apps can read the users’ notification data. This means we don’t lose any content on the transfer, including app icons.

One caveat is that system intents cannot be inherited by other apps. This means that a message will lose its “Reply” or “Mark as read” action upon being recreated.

Because of this, users are also given the option to either duplicate or replace the original notification.

Pinnit’s design is Android-first. It was designed to feel native and make the most out of Google’s Material 3 design system to drive its look and feel.

Structure

The app follows a 3-layer structure consisting of a backdrop, a navigation layer and a content sheet. The sheets can morph and move to house more content depending on the needs of the page.

Pinnit was a great example of a small app designed around a very specific use case. Not only was it a passion project for me, but it also gave me more room for experimentation, and greater opportunity to apply the polish it deserved.

Pinnit is currently available for Android devices.

This page covered the 2024 redesign of Pinnit. If you’d like to check the original page, click here.