Comment by jakear
5 years ago
This isn’t able notifications, this is about the “do you want to allow notifications” prompts. Crazy how in the same HN community you have people on one post complaining that there are too damn many cookie/gdpr/etc prompts, then on the next post asking for additional notification prompts. What ever happened to going to a website and consuming its content and leaving?
I get that making an app instead of a PWA is a pain the in the ass, but the reason I pay $$$ to Apple is so that pains like that exist in the developer’s ass instead of mine. I want to be in their walled garden and I want them to keep lazy developers and poor UX out.
> Whatever happened to going to a website and consuming it's content and leaving?
The internet became more powerful so it does more things. The PWA spec allows for zero-install apps that are just as performant (or more) than native apps. You can view their network requests in the console, and they run in a sandboxed environment. You want to download and install a binary for something that can be accomplished in a few kb of cached JavaScript?
I don’t want any websites sending me any notifications ever.
I don’t want any websites triggering the browser to ask me if they can send me notifications.
I don’t want any websites asking me if they can ask the browser to ask me to send me notifications.
I don’t want any websites using their classic scams like tiny “x” buttons that have insufficient contrast and are impossible to click on a mobile device anyways to ask me if they can ask the browser to send me notifications.
I don’t want to see my grandma dealing with scammers who trick her into allowing potentially phicious notifications that she doesn’t know how to cancel, or even what the source is.
I want developers to jump through as many bullshit hoops as possible before even having the chance to send me notifications. Apple and their review prices help me out there, and for all above points.
It seems to me like you believe everyone is the same as you: they value small package size, they personally audit all code they run, they want random corporations to have an easier time getting a presence on their home screen, and they’d be able to easily identify and stop all corporate badgering they do end up receiving. I don’t think any of those are true even for me (someone in the industry), let alone the population at large.
> I don’t want any websites sending me any notifications ever.
I agree with you actually, but not everybody does. Some people do want push notifications when they get a new email or Facebook update. I wish it weren't so, but it is.
> I don’t want any websites triggering the browser to ask me if they can send me notifications.
> I don’t want any websites asking me if they can ask the browser to ask me to send me notifications.
> I don’t want any websites using their classic scams like tiny “x” buttons...
Given that we live in a world where there are notifications, you have the choice to disable them on your device, or decline them on a site by site basis. For your grandma, I'd suggest the former strategy.
But if you don't want the site to ask you, and you don't want the browser to ask you, and you don't want to disable them for all sites, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. All the whining isn't going to bring back 90s internet.
> It seems to me like you believe everyone is the same as you: they value small package size, they personally audit all code they run, they want random corporations to have an easier time getting a presence on their home screen, and they’d be able to easily identify and stop all corporate badgering they do end up receiving
What's the difference between a native app asking to send you notifications vs a web app?
> I don’t want any websites sending me any notifications ever.
> I don’t want any websites triggering the browser to ask me if they can send me notifications
That’s fine for you but some of us who are in niche communities or have weird applications don’t want to wait for a VC to fund the development of a native app.
Right now I can’t get notifications from IRC at all which pushes me and everyone else to centralized chat services. This has distorted the evolution of the internet and I would argue has contributed heavily to the “fake news” problem.
> It seems to me like you believe everyone is the same as you
You’re projecting. We want a feature that the user can disable, not ever being able to use this at all means everyone has to want the same things you do.
2 replies →
None of us like the crazy number of prompts.
Most (all?) of us like to be the one who controls what we can do with our own devices.
These standards return some control to the user, rather than the corporation.
But then we get more prompts! Well, not necessarily. The user could choose to have all prompts automatically rejected, and only opt-in when they desired. This would not create more information for trackers to track, because Apple could make it the default for all of their devices.
This seems to solve the problem: People who want the features can have them, and the people who don't want them can ignore them without interruption.
This is where our problem with Apple is: there are solutions to be found but rather than solve them, Apple hides behind lies in order to protect their bottom line while harming many users and the internet as a whole.