Comment by falcor84
16 days ago
I'm not with you. I would absolutely love to be able to disable all of these antifeatures by sending a header rather than (at best) spend ages finding hidden settings or (at worst) having to use custom extensions or disable js entirely.
Push notifications are in standard settings for all apps in iPhone, or in the same place for everything in e.g. Firefox/Chrome. Autoplay is also trivial to disable in e.g. FireFox, and in iOS it is a global setting (though hidden in Accessibility). Nothing custom required.
Being able to disable some other features via header would be fantastic. I too would prefer more fine-grained control over these things, and that they were opt-in rather than opt-out, but I am not sure the majority of people feel that way.
My main point about the clumsiness is that these are ubiquitous app features that are everywhere even on non-addictive apps, so the given reasons really need to be more specific, or the (attempted) ban is effectively just banning apps being useful.
EDIT: Heck, even if there were some concrete suggestions, like "after X minutes of infinite scrolling, require a popup reminder to the user to take a break", this could easily be so much better. As it stands, it just sounds like standard, useful features (and standard combinations of features) are being demonized with little qualification or nuance.
EDIT2: They do even mention "implementing effective ‘screen time breaks'", but it is unclear if this is forced rationing vs. a reminder, so, again, really need more clarity and nuance on these things, especially in headlines and releases.