Depending on how this is implemented, this could actually be a step in the right direction. Lots of apps already send "promotional" push notifications (including big names like Lyft and Uber). The only way to turn them off was to turn off all notifications, which meant missing actual important updates. If this change means being able to opt-out of one without losing the other, I'm all for it.
Interestingly I interpret the article as apps were abusing push notifications without a second thought in the past when it was explicitly against the guidelines, I fail to see how they will self moderate now some of it is even allowed.
With the ample data we have so far it most probably will lead to dark UI patterns with dysfunctional opt-outs and/or blanket consents at most if someone takes it seriously at all.
There are some bad apps which will abuse it and use only one category for the important things and ads. But mostly - it's ok. Enforcing a channel for ads would be even better.
Yeah this works really well on Android, I'm surprised Apple hasn't taken a similar approach.
You don't want ads from Uber but still want a push when your ride arrives? Just block the ads channel in settings.
As you said I'm sure there's some bad apps out there that only have one channel, but I haven't noticed any. The big apps seem to support this quite well.
Don't enforce things if on average they already work. You don't know the second order effects. Currently developers have to balance spamminess versus people opting out completely, which probably diminishes future use of the app. That's a nice informal balance. Formalizing it may lead to much more spamminess since hey, you can always opt out.
> A built-in/centralized way in iOS to accomplish this
That would rely on the senders tagging the pushes correctly, as "ad" vs. "not-ad", which would ultimately fall back to App Store review enforcement anyways.
Funny I have had the opposite complaint of not getting any more reminders after the 1st month... since roughly 2 years.. and across different Android devices. They even have a setting for reminders and what time they should occur. I reported the bug multiple times and left reviews but the problem remains. I ended up resorting to cluttering up my Google Calendar with daily reminders.
The problem to me is that it is increasingly difficult to find software that is just useful, without disrespecting users constantly.
There are tons of issues in the App Store off the top of my head that I would rather Apple solve first (“making advertising easier” is #67422 on the list). And incidentally, their changes to search have made it incredibly hard to find apps I want, while adding...advertising!
Now, every day at least, when I open an app because I want to do something immediately, at least one will instead disrespect my time by popping up some modal first. “New features!” ”Promotional offer!” “Don’t you want to give us your E-mail first!?!?” Actually, no: I launched your app because I wanted to get something done, and your ad has made it slower.
Same with notifications, especially if you have secured your lock screen so that the subject of the notification is not immediately apparent. I want useful things, and I want everything else to go away. This seems like another step sideways or backwards from useful software.
I wish there were more open source iOS apps. Recouping development costs is probably a big driving factor and provided I haven’t dabbled in building iOS apps in years I imagine the open source community driven scene hasn’t hasn’t changed much in the iOS community and turn costs remain high.
The problem is that it costs money to develop iOS apps. Even just the $100/year or whatever it is, is enough to severely discourage open sourcing your apps.
On Android, you can create apps for free in your spare time and distribute them however you want. The lower barrier to entry means a lot more open source hobby projects.
Distribution is another big issue. Even if you found an open source iOS app, how are you going to run it on your own device? You can only run apps blessed by apple or pay the developer fees to compile it yourself.
Apple severely restricts the hobby/ open source market from both ends.
The problem is that sideloading is so difficult on iOS (you need a Mac, XCode, and then, after spending that $1k you realize that to keep the app on your phone for more than a couple days-one week, you have to pay Apple $99 per year) that people who would usually help open-source projects (where you use whatever tools you want and a free toolchain), have a much higher opportunity cost to getting involved with a iOS project.
If Apple had a mythical developer mode/SEP disengage button (like Macs and Chromebooks do) that voided the warranty, disabled the secure enclave (therefore Apple Pay and system-wide encryption), and put a big warning on the lockscreen in exchange for sideloading access to make development easier/cheaper, I think more people would do it.
Or if they let you build and compile apps on the iPad Pro that is super powerful but still can't be used for anything more taxing than word processing, but I've ranted about that on hn too much.
After Catalina's increase in ostentatious nagging for the supposed sake of security, something they made fun of Microsoft for during Windows Vista [0], I really hope there isn't some paradigm shift inside Apple to become just as bad regarding alerts and popups.
Catalina's security is significantly more useful that Vista's. Unlike accepting a UAC prompt, which was equivalent to running as root and often required for innocuous apps to function correctly, while allowing non-UAC approved apps to access and delete almost all of the logged-in user's own data and files, Catalina has a sandbox feature that protects untrusted apps from accessing even the own user's files/photos/contacts/etc, while almost no apps ever require root permissions
As a consumer, i uninstall such apps.
One example is the german „KaufDa“ app which was quite useful to me. I complained about the unwanted push messages and their support pretended to be dumb. I ended up uninstalling it.
Only if consumers refuse to accept these annoyances it will stop.
I was an Audible subscriber for 5+ years until they started sending ads through push notifications with no way to disable them (media controls are done through the notification system on Android so I didn't want to disable them at the OS level). I canceled my subscription and told them why.
Not that it makes it okay for Apple to allow this, but it goes without saying that any app that does this, paid or unpaid, is getting immediately uninstalled.
From what I understand is that this an actual step in the right direction as Apple is formalizing how users get these ad-notifications.
> The new rules will only permit sending push advertisements to users if they agree to it. Users must also be able to opt-out of the ads whenever they want.
With their growing policy on advertising, tracking and privacy I think they will move towards not allowing advertorial push notifications unless an user allows.
I turn off all notifications except for sms and calls. And even for sms, i muted most of the operator promotional sms. The urge to check for the phone and the demand that you have to check for this notification was killing me. Surprisingly enough, some people would go nuts when seeing a kid nagging in demand of certain thing, while they are totally ok with their apps doing the exact same thing and even worse
It comes with a gotcha though, as i sometimes check some chat apps awaiting for response, but the good thing is when that happens i notice it, and it is not the norm.
I have some hope that the EU will outlaw promotional push notifications that are not opt-in, similar to email spam. As it stands, push notifications are almost entirely useless because of all the noise.
I'm an iPhone user, I have a lot of apps on it, I receive a lot of notifications and I get no promotional notifications. I hope the "almost entirely useless" line was hyperbole :)
How about Apple bring down the hammer on apps that are abusing notifications right now (or you just uninstall them), instead of allowing ways to shove more ads into peoples eyeballs.
There is no scenario where this is a benefit to the consumer.
While I mostly agree that this would be abused, I disagree that there's no scenario where this is beneficial.
It's like email updates from online retailers. I unsubscribe from the majority of them, but I allow a couple of retailers I like to send me promotions.
> It's like email updates from online retailers. I unsubscribe from the majority of them, but I allow a couple of retailers I like to send me promotions.
Notifications are for when you need to know about something immediately and it's okay to interrupt you for it. How many of these retailers do you want that from? What's the benefit for the end-user over an email?
They wouldn't, because they earn millions off of apps like Uber and co. It's why Youtube is more tolerant of bad behaviour of high-profile (read: high-viewer, high-income) channels, and Twitter hasn't banned Trump and his bots yet - they make too much money off of it, both directly and indirectly ('engagement', network effects, etc).
Apple forced Uber to stop their location-tracking shenanigans when they were found out.
I agree that such large apps are treated somewhat differently than smaller ones—anyone smaller than Uber would have been banned outright. That’s due to demand from
Apple’s customers, though, and not
Uber directly paying Apple.
But Uber still had to rush and submit a new version of its app. They didn’t seem to believe Apple was making hollow threats, nor do Facebook and Google and all the other big players adhering to Apple’s policies.
Even if Apple wanted to allow larger apps breaking the rules, they couldn’t. It would be very obvious if some apps were allowed to send ads and others weren’t, and it would lead to all kinds of problems in the court of public opinion and possibly a real one.
I've only recently heard of push notifications. I feel like we are being inundated with so many notifications that we now need a super notifications. Where does this notification creep end? Normal notifications should be perfectly acceptable if things weren't spamming that method to begin with. I feel like notifications and eventually push notifications will go the way of the phone call. You won't even bother looking at them anymore because you know it has such a high chance of being nothing.
At any rate anything that puts an ad in my notifications is as good as uninstalled. I'm already unsure how to turn off the news push notifications that I'm getting now.
I'm not clear what you think push notifications are. They're what you seem to describe as "normal notifications".
The news notifications you're getting are the same push notifications that other apps have had for over a decade.
The most unfortunate thing is that, if you configure settings inside an app, half the time it's disrespected and that setting is changed later. It's safer to change in the Notifications center in iOS (eg, in the phone preferences, rather than in the app preferences).
Judging by the number defenders of advertising every time one of these sorts of threads shows up on HackerNews, it's astonishing to me how many people's livings are dependent on this garbage.
I’m amazed as well! Notifications are like permission for strangers to interrupt my life at their leisure. I don’t want their coupons, their announcements, their... whatever else. I’ve got important things in my life that I want to give my attention to and the last thing I need is a direct line into my pocket, desk, and home to try and get my attention. To me this sounds like a dystopian society where ad agencies rule the world. I recognize that not everyone is as extreme as me, but why can’t we agree that such notifications are not the best thing for us?
I agree. I ended up turning all notifications off except for the ones that I do want to be interrupted for (like texts from my SO or Uber) and my time spent on the phone decreased significantly.
As i said, i understand not everybody is willing. I personally am willing to do it for the most part.
There are of course apps/services where it's not practical, like facebook which seems to have become the worlds social life agenda, and even my kids school posts arrangements through facebook.
That doesn't mean that Facebook has the run of my phone, in fact i don't even have the app. I use the web interface along with content blockers (1Blocker) and PiHole/PFBlockerNG on my network.
Almost every service has some option to at least limit your exposure.
There are a lot of apps that are basically made of notifications. When I install Signal I want it to immediately ask me if sending notifications is ok so that I can say yes.
Interestingly, I run exactly this in one of my apps. A lot of users never actually figure out my app has notifications, but I sleep a lot better at night knowing that I'm not annoying people with prompts.
> People with an app installed for their favourite clothing brand, for example, may welcome a push notification to alert them when a sale is on.
So this wasn’t allowed before? But those “check out this stupid post from that random stranger” push notifications were allowed (maybe not on paper but definitely in practice)? Seems only fair then.
App Store rules / human interface guidelines don't apply to Apple. They believe they (as opposed to 3rd party devs) don't need these restrictions to ship secure, high-quality apps with a great experience.
Whether they succeed is debatable, but the reasoning (although perhaps unfair) is understandable.
And indeed, the plan seems to separate ads and genuine notifications into two channels, similar to what Android apparently currently has (not an Android user).
You can then decide which channel should be enabled.
Apps like "Bring!" are already far too spammy with their notification. The moment I see the first real ad pushed as a notification, I will disable notifications completely, for all apps.
Skip the dishes spams you with ad-like notifications, but you need notifications turned on for the app to be fully useful. I just uninstalled it. It’s incredibly rude. What’s next, YouTube sending me push notifications to buy Dominos
(they have been showing me dominos ads every time I go to the grocery store, even when I pay with cash and have location turned off)
Any app that spams my notifications with ads is an instant delete. Apps that did this in the past are not going to adhere to the "guidelines". Apple will be kinda lax at enforcing them if history is any predictor of the future.
I have turned off all Instagram notifications (in their settings) and still I get their junk notifications of who to follow and what to think. Hate it. If these ads are anything like this. Consider notifications off completely.
Depending on how this is implemented, this could actually be a step in the right direction. Lots of apps already send "promotional" push notifications (including big names like Lyft and Uber). The only way to turn them off was to turn off all notifications, which meant missing actual important updates. If this change means being able to opt-out of one without losing the other, I'm all for it.
Interestingly I interpret the article as apps were abusing push notifications without a second thought in the past when it was explicitly against the guidelines, I fail to see how they will self moderate now some of it is even allowed.
With the ample data we have so far it most probably will lead to dark UI patterns with dysfunctional opt-outs and/or blanket consents at most if someone takes it seriously at all.
Then these apps would be removed from the app store, I suppose.
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I would assume you could control the showing of ad notifications and non ad notifications separately as a user.
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This seems to work pretty well even when not enforced on Android: https://developer.android.com/training/notify-user/channels
There are some bad apps which will abuse it and use only one category for the important things and ads. But mostly - it's ok. Enforcing a channel for ads would be even better.
Yeah this works really well on Android, I'm surprised Apple hasn't taken a similar approach.
You don't want ads from Uber but still want a push when your ride arrives? Just block the ads channel in settings.
As you said I'm sure there's some bad apps out there that only have one channel, but I haven't noticed any. The big apps seem to support this quite well.
Don't enforce things if on average they already work. You don't know the second order effects. Currently developers have to balance spamminess versus people opting out completely, which probably diminishes future use of the app. That's a nice informal balance. Formalizing it may lead to much more spamminess since hey, you can always opt out.
You can keep the "ride is here" notifications in Lyft but turn the ads off by going to:
Menu > Settings > Privacy > Notifications Preferences > Discounts and News : Off
For Uber, it's similar: Menu > Settings > Privacy > Notifications > Discounts and News > Off
A built-in/centralized way in iOS to accomplish this (that's more discoverable) would be much better.
> A built-in/centralized way in iOS to accomplish this
That would rely on the senders tagging the pushes correctly, as "ad" vs. "not-ad", which would ultimately fall back to App Store review enforcement anyways.
I kind of like the all or nothing approach as far as "annoy me and I'll uninstall your app" goes.
Now the potential loss for the app maker for being annoying is far lower.
This assumes that there are competitors who don’t spam you. For taxi apps, you have no choice since all entrants do this.
If Runtastics reminders to start exercising again also fall under this category, I'm all for it.
Funny I have had the opposite complaint of not getting any more reminders after the 1st month... since roughly 2 years.. and across different Android devices. They even have a setting for reminders and what time they should occur. I reported the bug multiple times and left reviews but the problem remains. I ended up resorting to cluttering up my Google Calendar with daily reminders.
Probably also adjusts delivery priority and improves battery life.
Apple’s APIs are really good about exposing specific use-cases as separate functions and enums.
I don’t understand why this would make any difference regarding their ability to abuse push notifications for ads.
This level of granularity would be great for the contacts permission.
I don’t let any app get my contacts or my phone number anymore. They are too greedy with mine and others now.
If I could choose a subset of my social graph based on context I would.
The problem to me is that it is increasingly difficult to find software that is just useful, without disrespecting users constantly.
There are tons of issues in the App Store off the top of my head that I would rather Apple solve first (“making advertising easier” is #67422 on the list). And incidentally, their changes to search have made it incredibly hard to find apps I want, while adding...advertising!
Now, every day at least, when I open an app because I want to do something immediately, at least one will instead disrespect my time by popping up some modal first. “New features!” ”Promotional offer!” “Don’t you want to give us your E-mail first!?!?” Actually, no: I launched your app because I wanted to get something done, and your ad has made it slower.
Same with notifications, especially if you have secured your lock screen so that the subject of the notification is not immediately apparent. I want useful things, and I want everything else to go away. This seems like another step sideways or backwards from useful software.
I wish there were more open source iOS apps. Recouping development costs is probably a big driving factor and provided I haven’t dabbled in building iOS apps in years I imagine the open source community driven scene hasn’t hasn’t changed much in the iOS community and turn costs remain high.
The problem is that it costs money to develop iOS apps. Even just the $100/year or whatever it is, is enough to severely discourage open sourcing your apps.
On Android, you can create apps for free in your spare time and distribute them however you want. The lower barrier to entry means a lot more open source hobby projects.
Distribution is another big issue. Even if you found an open source iOS app, how are you going to run it on your own device? You can only run apps blessed by apple or pay the developer fees to compile it yourself.
Apple severely restricts the hobby/ open source market from both ends.
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The problem is that sideloading is so difficult on iOS (you need a Mac, XCode, and then, after spending that $1k you realize that to keep the app on your phone for more than a couple days-one week, you have to pay Apple $99 per year) that people who would usually help open-source projects (where you use whatever tools you want and a free toolchain), have a much higher opportunity cost to getting involved with a iOS project.
If Apple had a mythical developer mode/SEP disengage button (like Macs and Chromebooks do) that voided the warranty, disabled the secure enclave (therefore Apple Pay and system-wide encryption), and put a big warning on the lockscreen in exchange for sideloading access to make development easier/cheaper, I think more people would do it.
Or if they let you build and compile apps on the iPad Pro that is super powerful but still can't be used for anything more taxing than word processing, but I've ranted about that on hn too much.
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After Catalina's increase in ostentatious nagging for the supposed sake of security, something they made fun of Microsoft for during Windows Vista [0], I really hope there isn't some paradigm shift inside Apple to become just as bad regarding alerts and popups.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/442C7Ij.jpg (slide from an ancient WWDC)
Catalina's security is significantly more useful that Vista's. Unlike accepting a UAC prompt, which was equivalent to running as root and often required for innocuous apps to function correctly, while allowing non-UAC approved apps to access and delete almost all of the logged-in user's own data and files, Catalina has a sandbox feature that protects untrusted apps from accessing even the own user's files/photos/contacts/etc, while almost no apps ever require root permissions
I'm not sure they "get it", to be honest; most of the engineers run with security protections disabled so they don't see these…
> most of the engineers run with security protections disabled so they don't see these…
Are you talking about engineers within Apple? What is your source for this information?
2 replies →
As a consumer, i uninstall such apps. One example is the german „KaufDa“ app which was quite useful to me. I complained about the unwanted push messages and their support pretended to be dumb. I ended up uninstalling it.
Only if consumers refuse to accept these annoyances it will stop.
I was an Audible subscriber for 5+ years until they started sending ads through push notifications with no way to disable them (media controls are done through the notification system on Android so I didn't want to disable them at the OS level). I canceled my subscription and told them why.
I don't remember every having notifications so I went looking. Found them all disabled: https://imgur.com/QKdDIqz
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Now you will be able to use the app but not opt-in to promotional junk.
Or, more realistically, when it's outlawed. Though that's actually just customers collectively refusing to accept it.
You can disable notifications without uninstalling it.
Not that it makes it okay for Apple to allow this, but it goes without saying that any app that does this, paid or unpaid, is getting immediately uninstalled.
Or you could just turn off the ads, since the article says apps will be required to have a way to do so.
So in fact it is an improvement. As some apps intersperse ads with useful notifications now.
I'd still uninstall the app.
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Now, if only you could uninstall the system apps that did this without losing critical functionality…
From what I understand is that this an actual step in the right direction as Apple is formalizing how users get these ad-notifications.
> The new rules will only permit sending push advertisements to users if they agree to it. Users must also be able to opt-out of the ads whenever they want.
With their growing policy on advertising, tracking and privacy I think they will move towards not allowing advertorial push notifications unless an user allows.
I turn off all notifications except for sms and calls. And even for sms, i muted most of the operator promotional sms. The urge to check for the phone and the demand that you have to check for this notification was killing me. Surprisingly enough, some people would go nuts when seeing a kid nagging in demand of certain thing, while they are totally ok with their apps doing the exact same thing and even worse
It comes with a gotcha though, as i sometimes check some chat apps awaiting for response, but the good thing is when that happens i notice it, and it is not the norm.
I have some hope that the EU will outlaw promotional push notifications that are not opt-in, similar to email spam. As it stands, push notifications are almost entirely useless because of all the noise.
What apps do you use?
I'm an iPhone user, I have a lot of apps on it, I receive a lot of notifications and I get no promotional notifications. I hope the "almost entirely useless" line was hyperbole :)
Lyft is the abuser on my phone. I'm close to removing all notifications for it, but they are kind of an important part of using the product...
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On iOS at least, you can control which apps can send you notifications.
I see no unwanted ones as a result, because I only let well-behaved apps use notifications.
How about Apple bring down the hammer on apps that are abusing notifications right now (or you just uninstall them), instead of allowing ways to shove more ads into peoples eyeballs.
There is no scenario where this is a benefit to the consumer.
While I mostly agree that this would be abused, I disagree that there's no scenario where this is beneficial.
It's like email updates from online retailers. I unsubscribe from the majority of them, but I allow a couple of retailers I like to send me promotions.
> It's like email updates from online retailers. I unsubscribe from the majority of them, but I allow a couple of retailers I like to send me promotions.
Notifications are for when you need to know about something immediately and it's okay to interrupt you for it. How many of these retailers do you want that from? What's the benefit for the end-user over an email?
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> There is no scenario where this is a benefit to the consumer.
From what I can see, you will have to opt in to see these alerts, so that's pretty beneficial if companies start separating junk alerts out.
Elaborating further:
If apple forces ad-notifications to its own category and limits their rate and volume?
Furthermore, if apple enables users to disallow ad-notifications via permissions system?
I'd love to block promotional notifications of some applications which I have to use at the end of the day (e.g. airlines, network carrier, etc.)
This can be a Very Good Thing (TM) in the end.
Sure there is. Walk into a grocery store, get a push notification for some sale items.
There are also plenty of annoying things developers can do with it. I'll turn those off, or more likely uninstall the app.
That's....Not beneficial, at least in terms of what is going on behind the scenes.
1: App knows your location - most likely is profiting from that
2: App can see how often you visit $place, all for the cost of a few 'sale' items.
3: More extensive profiling can possibly occur, depending on what data the OS allows you to access.
As apposed to:
1: Walk to shop, no smartphone, see discounts inside shop.
There's 0 reason this information needs to be presented via any form of 'notification'. It could literally be done by $shop.com/discounteditems.txt.
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>Sure there is. Walk into a grocery store, get a push notification for some sale items.
Or: walk into the store, open the app of your own volition, and peruse the sale items.
They wouldn't, because they earn millions off of apps like Uber and co. It's why Youtube is more tolerant of bad behaviour of high-profile (read: high-viewer, high-income) channels, and Twitter hasn't banned Trump and his bots yet - they make too much money off of it, both directly and indirectly ('engagement', network effects, etc).
Apple forced Uber to stop their location-tracking shenanigans when they were found out.
I agree that such large apps are treated somewhat differently than smaller ones—anyone smaller than Uber would have been banned outright. That’s due to demand from Apple’s customers, though, and not Uber directly paying Apple.
But Uber still had to rush and submit a new version of its app. They didn’t seem to believe Apple was making hollow threats, nor do Facebook and Google and all the other big players adhering to Apple’s policies.
Even if Apple wanted to allow larger apps breaking the rules, they couldn’t. It would be very obvious if some apps were allowed to send ads and others weren’t, and it would lead to all kinds of problems in the court of public opinion and possibly a real one.
1 reply →
How does Apple make money off of Uber and co?
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I've only recently heard of push notifications. I feel like we are being inundated with so many notifications that we now need a super notifications. Where does this notification creep end? Normal notifications should be perfectly acceptable if things weren't spamming that method to begin with. I feel like notifications and eventually push notifications will go the way of the phone call. You won't even bother looking at them anymore because you know it has such a high chance of being nothing.
At any rate anything that puts an ad in my notifications is as good as uninstalled. I'm already unsure how to turn off the news push notifications that I'm getting now.
If you've used iOS or Android within the last 12 or so years then you've almost certainly received push notifications.
Google introduced Google Cloud Messaging [0] in 2007 and Apple introduced Apple Push Notification service in 2008 [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Messaging
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Push_Notification_servic...
I'm not clear what you think push notifications are. They're what you seem to describe as "normal notifications".
The news notifications you're getting are the same push notifications that other apps have had for over a decade.
The most unfortunate thing is that, if you configure settings inside an app, half the time it's disrespected and that setting is changed later. It's safer to change in the Notifications center in iOS (eg, in the phone preferences, rather than in the app preferences).
Judging by the number defenders of advertising every time one of these sorts of threads shows up on HackerNews, it's astonishing to me how many people's livings are dependent on this garbage.
I’m amazed as well! Notifications are like permission for strangers to interrupt my life at their leisure. I don’t want their coupons, their announcements, their... whatever else. I’ve got important things in my life that I want to give my attention to and the last thing I need is a direct line into my pocket, desk, and home to try and get my attention. To me this sounds like a dystopian society where ad agencies rule the world. I recognize that not everyone is as extreme as me, but why can’t we agree that such notifications are not the best thing for us?
I agree. I ended up turning all notifications off except for the ones that I do want to be interrupted for (like texts from my SO or Uber) and my time spent on the phone decreased significantly.
It's fine.
Personally, any app that insists on spamming me with adds is not worth my time, and i replace it with "something" else that fits the bill.
The same goes for apps that have subscription models, apps that require access to gps/microphone/etc without an explicit need for it.
I've replaced about 20 such apps in the past couple of years.
I understand that not everybody is willing to make that move, but everybody has the option to do so.
Sounds nice in theory, except: network effects.
As i said, i understand not everybody is willing. I personally am willing to do it for the most part.
There are of course apps/services where it's not practical, like facebook which seems to have become the worlds social life agenda, and even my kids school posts arrangements through facebook.
That doesn't mean that Facebook has the run of my phone, in fact i don't even have the app. I use the web interface along with content blockers (1Blocker) and PiHole/PFBlockerNG on my network.
Almost every service has some option to at least limit your exposure.
Throwing a "This app wants to send you notifications" dialog as soon as you launch an app for the first time, should be banned.
That would be pointless and regressive.
There are a lot of apps that are basically made of notifications. When I install Signal I want it to immediately ask me if sending notifications is ok so that I can say yes.
Conversely, I find it really useful to block any notification from the get go.
Notifications are blocked by default.
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Then you have to ban iOS, because it's the system that throws that notification if you run an app that has notifications in its capabilities list.
That’s completely inaccurate, the dialog only shows once the app requests the permission.
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At the very least, there should be a system-wide option to decline all new notification prompts.
Interestingly, I run exactly this in one of my apps. A lot of users never actually figure out my app has notifications, but I sleep a lot better at night knowing that I'm not annoying people with prompts.
Why don’t you do it the first time they access a feature related to notifications?
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This is ok as long as it's explicitly opt in and I'm not going to be nagged every week to opt in for the same thing.
> People with an app installed for their favourite clothing brand, for example, may welcome a push notification to alert them when a sale is on.
So this wasn’t allowed before? But those “check out this stupid post from that random stranger” push notifications were allowed (maybe not on paper but definitely in practice)? Seems only fair then.
Promotional push notifications were technically against the rules but it was never enforced. Hell, Apple does it themselves.
App Store rules / human interface guidelines don't apply to Apple. They believe they (as opposed to 3rd party devs) don't need these restrictions to ship secure, high-quality apps with a great experience.
Whether they succeed is debatable, but the reasoning (although perhaps unfair) is understandable.
Does iOS have notification channels like Android? So you can disable the ads and keep other notifications from one app?
Right now there is only one notification channel.
And indeed, the plan seems to separate ads and genuine notifications into two channels, similar to what Android apparently currently has (not an Android user).
You can then decide which channel should be enabled.
Apps like "Bring!" are already far too spammy with their notification. The moment I see the first real ad pushed as a notification, I will disable notifications completely, for all apps.
Apple has already conditioned me to turn off notifications, now they just seem to be doubling down on how obnoxious notifications can be.
Skip the dishes spams you with ad-like notifications, but you need notifications turned on for the app to be fully useful. I just uninstalled it. It’s incredibly rude. What’s next, YouTube sending me push notifications to buy Dominos
(they have been showing me dominos ads every time I go to the grocery store, even when I pay with cash and have location turned off)
There's an obvious reason for the change: Apple plans to push their new subscription services heavily via the OSes.
Sounds bad on initial read, but to me this is a great shortcut for which applications to uninstall.
I’m fine with this. If an app is push notifying me with Ads I know I need to uninstall it.
Any app that spams my notifications with ads is an instant delete. Apps that did this in the past are not going to adhere to the "guidelines". Apple will be kinda lax at enforcing them if history is any predictor of the future.
I have turned off all Instagram notifications (in their settings) and still I get their junk notifications of who to follow and what to think. Hate it. If these ads are anything like this. Consider notifications off completely.
Did you know that you can use instagram in your browser? The only thing that‘s missing without the app is video upload.
I thought this was allowed for apps in Chinese AppStore? All big-name apps like Taobao, WeChat, Didi sent me unwanted promotional notifications
In theory, promotional notifications were banned but in practice, it was never enforced, with even Apple's own apps breaking this rule.
So ads can get pushed to my phone but not IRC mentions and PMs?
I’m done with this. Now I need to get iMessage working in qemu...
If you send me a promotional push notification, odds are I'm going to delete your fucking app.
My bank was already sending me advertisement by push notifications on my phone.
A lot of apps did, even Apple itself for Apple TV+, Apple Music (and they got criticized a lot for that as it was against their own rules).
The idea of having finer grained permissions for that kind of notification seems reasonable to me.
They lost the battle it seems.