If my phone interrupts me, it should either mean someone genuinely needs my attention right now or it should not be disrupting me at all. That's my notification set up.
Apps allowed to receive push notifications
Phone,
Messages,
Whatsapp,
Apple Health,
[brand] bank.
That concludes the list.
There is no reason any other app needs to be able to instantly ping me. Most apps are not notifying you because something matters; they are notifying you because they want your attention.
I do not need notifications about streaks, sales, recommendations, delivery updates etc. All that can wait until I choose to open the app. It is not urgent enough to justify interrupting me.
Yeah, this entire article is pretty transparent that it's from the sender perspective, and worried about platforms taking over "sender control".
Who is he kidding? The vast majority of apps have absolutely proven they can't be trusted to respect your attention. From my perspective, the more roadblocks the platforms put between unnecessary notifications and my phone, the better. And I don't think Apple or Google are some sort of heroes here, but I do believe their incentives better align with mine than the marketing department of some app I was forced to download because I bought a ticket once or something like that.
Notification categories are like mailing lists now. You may have unsubscribed from the daily deals email but you're still going to be auto subscribed to every new slightly modified category in perpetuity. Unless you fully disable notifications for an app (in Android at least, in my experience), new enabled by default notification categories are added all the time.
> From my perspective, the more roadblocks the platforms put between unnecessary notifications and my phone, the better.
I know lots of apps behave badly when it comes to notifications but I'd still prefer if the apps controlled the level of notifications they sent. I could, of course, reduce that client-side, but I don't see why I'd want Google or Apple or any other intermediary see or control the notifications.
If an app behaves inappropriately, I could uninstall it. If a gatekeeper like Google or Apple prevent an app from sending me notifications, I'd have to change my OS, usually my hardware, too.
> I do believe their incentives better align with mine than the marketing department of some app I was forced to download because I bought a ticket once or something like that.
Align better for now. It will get enshittified.
I try very hard to avoid installing apps specific to a particular business or organisation. So far I have only had to install a government app and some from banks. Even those are avoidable (but it would be very inconvenient to do so).
The biggest problem are apps that do both. For example, I want Uber to notify me when my driver has arrived, but I don't want it to notify me when they have a special 10% discount on my next 5 rides. It's not straightforward to block one but not the other.
If I order an Uber, I already know it is coming. I was the person who ordered it.
This is how taxis worked for decades before smartphones existed. You phoned for a taxi, then remained vaguely aware that it would arrive shortly.
The question is whether a single “it has arrived” notification is worth the surrounding noise: “driver accepted”, “driver is nearby”, “rate your driver”, “here’s 10% off your next ride”, and so on.
In most cases, it is not. The useful information is either already obvious (you can see the car outside) or you have re-opened the app to check where they are.
Operational and marketing notifications should never share the same permission. Until that is enforced at the OS level, I will treat them all as unnecessary spam.
It's a failure of iOS architecture to not force applications to tag each notification with labels. App developers have to build notification management themselves for fine grained control.
periodically open the app every few minutes or so. once the driver is 5 minutes away -- go outside and wait.
it's a tradeoff. eliminating notification spam means behaving more synchronously when booking a taxi. i don't mind waiting outside for five minutes. especially if i'm not getting a random ping when i'm definitely not booking a taxi :shrugs:
Most people aren’t aware but there are laws that require granular notification consent. For example the GDPR has it. I’m currently fighting with a major bank and educating them about my rights. I want to receive security related notifications but not get spammed by “get a loan up to 50k without lifting a finger” type of bulls*. Send send this almost every week..
The user legitimately considers the application as hostile - hence sandboxing... Notification spam filtering is now the obvious need at the sandbox's edge, with the whole customizable arsenal we have come to expect for our inbound mail. Of course, Google will not cooperate with anything likely to reduce sacro-sanct engagement !
Tell me use iOS without telling me you do. Android has separate notification channel toggles, so I've turned off the marketing ones. I was shocked and aghast when I spent a year trying to use an iPhone that it didn't do this. Part of the reason I went back to my trusty Pixels.
And the worst part is that Apple could fix this in a heartbeat. Uber is straightforwardly in violation of App Store policies about "no advertising in push notifications", but a) they're too big to fail and b) Apple advertises via push notifications all the fucking time, so they have no leg to stand on here.
It's infuriating that the one thing the App Store monopoly could be useful for isn't even actually used in practice (if you're big enough, ofc, you and me get to eat shit if we try to evade App Store policy).
WellsFargo does that. Important notification and advert-BS on the same channel. If you block their notifications you don't get the near-real-time Zelle alert. Enabled you get what you want and also YOU MIGHT BE PRE-APPROVED!
On Android with notification categories it is, but iOS doesn't have that. Also, I think it's mostly a trust system. But Uber in particular does actually do it right, and you can just turn off promotional notifications.
I totally agree. Right now the apps that can notify me are phone, text, email, what's app, and a few bank apps. You are 100% right about turning it off on everything else.
I also stopped doing store loyalty cards about 7 years ago and it's been fantastic. I actually get a lot less junk mail and spam/"legit" marketing emails. I don't have a gob of cards to sort through.
"Marketing never met a communication system they didn't want to co-opt"
(I'm reminded of this every time a client want "WhatsApp support" in their (commercial) app, so they can "communicate with customers".)
But equally every user will have a different subset of apps they want notifications for.
For example shift workers need to know when they've been allocated a shift. Or when a shift has opened up (because someone scheduled failed to arrive etc.) One group of users consider this really important, another group of users treat it as spam.
But, per the rule above, unfortunately "useful notifications" can easily be subverted by marketing notifications. Yes I want to know my delivery driver is outside, no I don't want to know that you're running a special this week.
Unfortunately there's no way to solve this problem technically. Bad actors can (and definitely do) behave badly. But ultimately the system should work for "good citizens". In other words, the user should ultimately determine what they want to see of not. And if an app has "notifications on or off" as the only option then the user should ultimately determine that setting. Not Google. Not Apple.
Building society around the lowest-common-denominator just ends up sucking for everyone. We should actively promote good behavior, while allowing bad behavior to be punished. Not just banning everything "because it might be bad".
You're conflating "push notifications" with "being alerted about push notifications." I have many "important but not urgent" apps on my phone configured to just silently add their push notifications into iOS's notification center.
With an app configured to do notifications like this, no banner shows up at the time the app's notifications are delivered; and these notifications don't even show up visibly on the lock screen. You only see this type of notification if you choose to actively scroll down past the "timely" notifications that do get delivered onto your lock screen, to "catch up" on all your notifications.
Basically, these notifications are relegated to an "email inbox" that you can check or not check as you like. But unlike your email inbox, you can go "inbox zero" on your notification "inbox" whenever you like without worry, since notifications (unlike email) are inherently prohibited from being a critical path in an app workflow.
Just curious, what do you do with the increasing number of companies that use push notifications as a form of advertising venue, and how do you differentiate the security warning notification from your camera app from their special weekly annual sale notification?
The marginal cost of each notification is so low that companies simply spam users nonstop, and their A/B tests shows that the revenue is increasing. What's being lost though is that we're getting more and more agitated with these brands and their uncapped malicious behaviors. This is also true with their UI and UX as well, they keep adding banners with incredibly small close buttons, because someone will continue with the shopping after accidently missing the tiny button, and that's an added sale, who cares about 99% of users who are fuming with dissatisfaction, what are they going to throw away their $200-300 smart home device because companies abuse them?
> Phone, Messages, Whatsapp, Apple Health, [brand] bank.
Anyone else annoyed by the fact that you can set up do-no-disturb, with exceptions for certain phone numbers, but it doesn't work for apps like WhatsApp?
I remember a while back I also had this issue on iOS (maybe around 2022 or so), though lately seems to be solved and works as one can hope so. When you're making the exceptions, do you explicitly input phone numbers or some other method? I selected contacts from my contacts list and it does the job. This is for iOS in my case. I'm not familiar with Android, so cannot give any input there..
Maybe it's for the best. The best practice is to have as few apps as possible. The moment an app is abusive with notifications, you know it's time to drop the app anyhow. A lot of people need that one final push to drop the app, so this could help.
My notification setup is more elaborate (for one, I do keep social media notifications on, but silent) but yeah I agree in general. It frightens me seeing some other people's notification shades where they have 20+ spam notifications from all kinds of things that I wouldn't even consider installing an app for, and they're somehow fine with it.
Apple and Google failed to make push notifications usable for the past decade. Most important notifications drown in a sea of absolutely irrelevant nonsense. It's a very primitive mechanism where many apps compete for very little screen real estate. Beyond "something happened!" there isn't a whole lot of information in most push notifications. They are mostly not very actionable and very vague about what actually happened. And "something happened!" just isn't very useful information to me. This has de-valued the whole notion of having notifications. Whenever something interesting actually does flash by, I often miss it or can't find it back.
The push notification UX is just beyond terrible and it just got worse over time as app developers tried abusing their super power of being able to interrupt the user at will and Apple and Google tried to get on top of that. The net result is something that's very mediocre for the handful of valid uses I have left for notifications. My list is similar to yours. Things like bank approvals, 2FA stuff, etc. are useful mainly as deeplinks into apps. But other than that, it's just not worth dropping whatever I'm doing and staring at my phone.
The most used apps on my Android phone (older Google pixel model) are Firefox and gmail and just a handful of other things. As a notification channel, my email inbox is actually far more useful than mobile push notifications. They are more actionable and informative. And I can individually unsubscribe them or filter them out and easily find them back. Most apps can do both and that makes the push notifications inferior and redundant.
> The most used apps on my Android phone (older Google pixel model) are Firefox and gmail and just a handful of other things. As a notification channel, my email inbox is actually far more useful than mobile push notifications. They are more actionable and informative. And I can individually unsubscribe them or filter them out and easily find them back.
There’s also substantially more filtering happening in the inbox which is mostly useful from a user perspective.
Yahoo literally wrote a paper more than a decade ago showing how they can model predictive causal chains for emails they expect you to receive, as an example.
Same: Phone, Messages, Calendar, Apple Health... nothing else can send me notifications.
On my work I also disabled all notifications except for the calendar. Even slack message our main tool for communication is not allowed to send notifications. It is almost a productivity hack :P
And let's not forget focus modes... I have them that narrow greatly my default set of notifications, so I have a 3 tiers of notifications.
It's like the complaint I used to hear all the time: "Slack ruins work for me! OMG I can't work with constant interruptions!!" That is bewildering, because if that's how you feel, you haven't tuned your setup. Slack never interrupts me, yet I am response enough to slack messages. No one has ever complained about my response time. And I'm probably the most-messaged person on our Slack.
For Slack, I find just changing the default notification sound to a simple and subtle ding works well.
When I’m focused, I don’t hear it because it’s too subtle. But when I’m not concentrating on anything, it’s more noticeable and I don’t mind the distraction.
This might not work for everyone (“YMMV” and all), but I’ve personally found it a very effective yet simple solution.
I would say the same applies to background processing as well. A random app that I don’t interact with launching every minute and wasting everything from battery to network bandwidth is simply not acceptable, and most of the time they’re loading adds or doing some other stuff that serves me no good.
I wish I could set this as the user. Apple ties background app refresh to the frequency of use, but that sucks for self-hosted photo backups. I use Immich and I don't open it too often, so Apple breaks my chosen backup system for my photos.
That said, my view is now (not novel, or unique) that I am not the customer in so many cases. Any app or platform with the slightest hint of an advertising end-game restructures my usage as the product.
The customer is instead the sender (or advertiser). So, I can't expect ideal app behavior and usage based on my intentions because I'm sold (as the product) rather than the other way around.
Maybe a cynical view, and there are exceptions, but don't think I'm far off.
Exactly. Senders have earned the questionable reputation that they have because they rabidly want your attention whether you want to give it or not.
I used the Southwest Airlines app recently and allowed notifications so that I could find out about things like delays and gate changes (both of which happened on my trip). Less than a week later I'm getting ads for travel "deals" pushed as notifications.
Unsurprisingly, it was difficult to find the notification setting, which was on their website, not even in the app.
I don't get what you guys are doing to be so bothered by notifications. I get them on my wirst and even then it isn't enough to take away mental bandwidth.
My bank likes to show offers, like a 10% discount in tires, but I have no car. Perhaps tree or four irrelevant messages per day.
I have MouseTimer that is an alarm that is nice to show to kids when they must wait or do something for 10 or 20 minutes. It should be able to ring and sometimes show notifications.
I have broadly the same list as you do, but stuff like WhatsApp, Messenger, and other "non primary" communications platforms have silent notifications in the sense that they're not allowed on the lock screen or Home Screen. They simply display a notification counter.
Stuff I care about that I can't do anything about "right now" are allowed on the lock screen but quietly. That includes messages from the kids schools. Most is not even that important, like field trips "next week", but once in a while there's an "important" message I need to deal with.
I went even further and my small set of the most important applications runs in the background - rest doesn't have that privilege. I've treated my spare Samsung phone same way.
I also don't use Siri either beyond setting timers and lights in home and every application is also excluded from being "suggested". Apple for 14 years didn't bother to add support for Polish so it basically remains useless.
At this point, I'm pretty much in some form of DND at all times. I have a very small list of people that I allow the device to notify me at any time for calls/messages. Everyone else gets silenced and I'll get back to them when I choose. All other apps have notifications disabled and I'm constantly nagged about it when using those apps
I'm personally just at messages. And even then I make it clear I respond when I want to. Only phone rings/notifications I get are for those in my contact list.
Take your phones back. Life is immensely better these days.
Your position is that of any normal human. Google is committed to evil however, just look at how playstore notifications are tied to sales spam. Want payment notifivations? Gotta take the ads as well, not seperate toggles, one toggle. Drink liquid shit you tech peasant. Oh? this hostility drove you to f-droid? We'll unilaterally decide every device r belong to us, so we can disable competition we dont approve of. Welcome back to the liquid shit trough, peasant.
I have it turned off for my bank. For some reason Bank of America doesn't allow me to sign in with Face ID. I always need to get a text. Only reason I keep them is because I like a brick and mortar bank nearby.
It's absolutely disgusting how most tech companies use notifications as an advertising or addiction building channel.
On the rare times I use an app like uber eats, I uninstall it directly after because the app sends multiple adverts a day through the notifications. I want a notification purely to tell me the driver is almost here. And nothing else.
I've noticed a priority inversion in recent iOS. Want to send me an SMS that matches a ban-list regex from a third party app, from a foreign phone number / obvious spam farm? No problem. The app to block you was auto-uninstalled, and the iOS notification filter will mark your message with the highest possible priority.
Want to continue a 300 message thread that I've been responding to? You're listed as my emergency contact, and called multiple times? Fuck right off. Straight to spam.
It's almost enough to get me to carry a second dumb phone or grapheneos device just so I can text and receive phone calls.
For me I definitely need Calendar and sometimes Clock (alarm). iOS is constantly freaking me out by prompting me whether or not I want to continue receiving notifications from those apps. To me those apps exist entirely for the purpose of generating notifications and it terrifies me that by repeatedly popping stupid questions like that, I'm going to accidentally answer wrong and effectively delete my most important app accidentally. It boggles my mind that somewhere someone thought Clock and Peggle were basically on equal footing here.
Agreed. I have a doc appointment app, where I like the notifications to be on for reminders etc.
Lately they started sending marketing messages through that channel. Now I’m sure it’s possible to turn off the marketing messages. But I bet most people don’t know and won’t change that. It’s super annoying.
> I’m sure it’s possible to turn off the marketing messages.
Uber may have that functionality, but a surprising number of other apps don't - for example Makro, Tops, and 7/11 Thailand, three very popular Thailand retailers, use notifications for when an order is out for delivery, about to arrive, etc. But they also send constant promotion notifications every day, even with audio alerts enabled.
I absolutely hate medical marketing. I recently decided to switch dermatology practices over a combination of bad data management, unwelcome marketing for cosmetic dermatology products, and unsolicited SMSs. I never consented to receive marketing or texts (or to lose my data in a data breach, or to be billed for the in person services by practices other than the one from which I received services and ignored unopened as spam because I didn’t recognize the sender, etc…)
I wish Apple would force app developers to implement different "channels" for promotional notifications vs transactional - so that you can pick and choose which ones you want.
The "you" in the title's reference to "your push notifications" is not the user, it is the marketer. That tells you everything you need to know about the value of this piece.
Something might come of introspecting why such controls are being built and desired by consumers instead of trying to frame everything as a "big tech evil!!1" narrative.
I can’t think of a single app I want a “Discover” tab on anymore. The moment you include one is the moment there is someone trying to game it. I definitely don’t want push notifications trying to show me something new. I’m hardly lacking in distractions
(Yes I am sure somebody can give me an example of a good use of Discover but you get my point)
is it unironically incomprehensible to you that the owner of the device should in the one who gets to decide what is and isn't spam? it's not email where you can get bombarded with shit from any random server - you can mute or uninstall an app.
That's not entirely fair to the author as the article also states that the consumer being in control is a must:
> Every step subtracts a degree of sender control. Some of it passes to the user, and that is a good thing: a person deciding what is allowed to interrupt them is the channel working as it should. The rest passes to the platform, and that is the part that should concern a sender, because the platform's judgment is opaque, unappealable, and increasingly made by a model rather than by a setting the user chose.
A platform has essentially two "clients" - the user and the developer. Without both, it wouldn't exist. And it is in the interest of both that the platform should have very limited arbitrary authority over them. Nobody can deny today that the platform owners today have too much power over their users and their developers, which makes it easy for them to commercially exploit them while undermining their rights. We need regulations and standards (for interoperability, which is one of the arguments being made) to counter this.
Been an app developer since 2009, worked on Android for 6 years at Google. Push notifications suck, users hate them.
Simultaneously, I cannot match the pull quote, an argument summary, to their argumentation. IIUC if the reword patent / Apple’s summarizing disappear there’s 0 reason to say it wasn’t control passing purely to the consumer.
So I’m left a bit empty as the high-minded purpose has little backing, and thus comes across as bloviating.
I’m constantly amazed how passive people are with things that steal their attention
My phone is in do not disturb mode 24/7. If your app notifies me about something pointless, it gets deleted and I start using your website instead
I have a mail rule that moves any email with the word “unsubscribe” out of the inbox into its own tagged area. Every few days, I go in and unsubscribe to everything that’s arrived.
Whenever a retail point of sale worker asks for my details or phone number or asks me to sign up to their club, I ask if there’s a discount. Because if there’s no discount - they get no details. It’s a simple exchange; offer to pay a fair price for my details and I’ll consider it. But so far my time and details are worth more than any retailer has offered to pay.
With the retailer asking for a phone number, I don’t see how it would ever be worth even entertaining. They will give you a discount once, then have and potentially abuse your information for years to come.
That's precisely why I don't ever accept the bribe. If I don't like the non-discounted price, then I don't buy it. Now they neither get the data nor the sale.
What's frustrating is that a lot of grocery stores do this. If you sell something absolutely necessary, such as basic foods, you should not be allowed to do the whole "mark it up to mark it down" strategy.
Also, a tip for most grocery stores (at least in the US): enter in any area code plus 867-5309. Chances are high that somebody has registered it. It's better than sharing with a family member because so many people are using it, the data becomes less useful.
Alternatively, ask the clerk to "use the store card". Usually, they will oblige.
You can make an email rule to filter those messages to trash.
I have my phone set to only ring for people in my address book. It’s probably time to do something similar for email. Not in my address book? Straight to trash.
I get your point and see it as valid, yet to nitpick most people don't feel they have a choice.
Not answering the phone or replying to people's messages is a no-no to many, which sets them in an arms race against spammers and social apps trying to get them from all fronts. And they get frustrated by us living in no-disturb land 24/7.
I don't know it could be solved, but I feel for them.
Turn off all notifications except messaging and see how your day goes. It's not going to kill you. You quickly get used to regularly checking things you actually care about, and the rest has to wait until YOU care.
I've been doing this for many years, and none of my friends or colleagues are aware of it, and they don't need to be. Notifications don't help you respond quickly, they just grab your attention from things YOU wanted to do.
I haven't checked Discord today yet. I haven't checked my email. Whenever I do want to know if my friends wrote me, or if I have some new bills, or if I need to follow up on something, I will open the respective app and deal with it.
I can put my phone next to me for hours and not get distracted.
> You quickly get used to regularly checking things you actually care about, and the rest has to wait until YOU care.
This was the biggest thing for me. Before, I was paranoid that if I turned off notifications, I'd miss something important. As though I didn't miss notifications anyway.
Getting used to regularly checking (important) things also has two wonderful side effects (at least it did for me):
* My "mental notification system" got better. Because I was less dependent on my phone doing it for me, I developed the skill more on my own.
* The apps and services that I checked less and less frequently became more obvious in how unimportant they were to me altogether. I have far fewer apps and accounts now, making me MORE punctual overall.
Whatever has replaced the Bulk Collection of Telephony Metadata Under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act informs the architecture of the Apple Push Notification, Firebase Cloud Messaging, etc. Apple owns the persistent connection to every iPhone, and only APNs can wake your app. So "self-hosting" here means running your own provider (the backend that decides what to send and hands it to APNs) instead of paying a third party like Firebase Cloud Messaging, OneSignal, or Pusher to do that for you. The last mile is never yours however. Any architecture that routes everyone's traffic through a small number of identity-aware intermediaries is, by construction, a bulk-metadata collection system waiting for a legal instrument.
[2] In December 2023 Senator Ron Wyden disclosed that the U.S. government and foreign governments had secretly compelled Google and Apple to turn over information from push notifications, including communications metadata and sometimes content. A detail that should bother any developer: app developers have no way to stop the practice if they want to send notifications on the platforms iPhones and Android rely on. Apple had been gagged from disclosing it until the program became public, after which it said it was updating its transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests. So the architectural hypothesis isn't speculative — it's the confirmed mechanism, differing from Section 215 mainly in domain (apps vs. calls) and legal vehicle (ordinary subpoenas, FISA orders, and NSLs rather than the specific business-records theory of §215)
[1] "Its just metadata". Thanks Obama! (joking of course, no single individual is responsible for these things, it is our collective political will and its the best we can do unfortunately)
> Over fifteen years the channel has been rebuilt around one assumption: the receiver's attention is a scarce resource the platform is obliged to defend. … As a sender you are on the wrong side of that assumption, whichever way the control moved.
Fascinating how the author openly frames the situation as the sender and receiver’s interests being opposed.
> None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified.
> For most of the channel's history they did very little of it visibly. The architecture was permissive of intervention; they simply chose not to intervene much. That restraint is what ended.
I guess it wasn't always visible, but they were intervening in some for or another since the beginning. At WhatsApp, push delay/suppression/coalescing was something we were always monitoring, and IIRC, it was part of the system since at least when I joined in 2011. If you don't work within the system, your users' messages don't get delivered timely.
Huh that’s interesting, do you have any further context on that? I’ve not worked on a product with anywhere near that scale before so monitoring has always been whatever I can get from commercial push platforms
I mean... record the time we first send a push message, when a client connects have it tell you if it's because it got a push or user interactive start, check the time between push and connection, add that to your choice of time series graphing tool. Graph by platform, and you can see when the platforms are delaying pushes.
Some of the delay will be ordinary things like their push service fell over or is unreliable (you also get some feedback when they don't accept push messages), or their push connection runs into silent NAT timeouts on some networks. But some of it will be things like you ran into an undocumented push quota, so Blackberry users don't get timely pushes at peak, etc. On client platforms where you have reliable background execution with network connectivity, you can potentially signal connecting clients if platform push isn't working well and have them switch to persistent connections until the push service comes back. But that was never an option for iOS; it hasn't been a reasonable option for Android since at least Android 6 when Doze was introduced... and app killers before then made it hard before then; and all the other platforms are dead. Now, push really just has to work.
AFAIK, Apple has always been willing to deprioritize pushes when you send "too many", especially when there's no user interaction; or when they added silent (voip) pushes to wake up the app, they only let you have a few silent pushes if you don't post a user visible push.
For ordinary async messaging, push latency doesn't become a big deal until it hits double digit seconds. For voice/video calls, you really want pushes to be as near to real time as possible, or the caller is gone before the callee phone rings.
I wish apple/google would implement better notification control - like the ability to turn off all marketing notifications, and a much better digest format
Notification Channels is the official way to do this on Android, but it's up to the app developer to categorize them properly. They have no incentive to allow you to turn off ads.
Actually, they do have an incentive to let you turn off ads. If they don't, many users will turn off notifications entirely. At least if they categorize them, some users will just turn off the bothersome ones.
If you're on Android, I'll always recommend Buzzkill to add very granular rules for notification filtering. I set up all kinds of filters just for the Amazon app.
On iOS I assume you're sol, that notification system is unhinged to my eyes.
You are less charitable than me. Maybe I'll adopt your approach. I first give an app the benefit of the doubt and go into the apps notification preferences and see if I can fine-tune their notifications. If not, off for all at the OS-level. If yes, I tweak it, but if I get surprised by one later, off for all at the OS-level or uninstall. It's especially annoying because I don't have notifications shown on my home screen and need to unlock with a pin so if I go through the trouble of unlocking my phone to spam and I extra annoyed with the app.
That would be nice. I wouldn’t be surprised, as on-phone models get more capable, if we don’t see them start to build an “inbox” like we see with email where you can then start seeing much more heavy processing happening.
I think that's what the Notification Organizer on Android (maybe Pixel exclusive, not sure) does. It's sorting notifications into broad categories using AI and groups them in the notification shade.
While I have slight worries about what it means for users if Apple and Google notification services go down/censoring, I do appreciate the features that they provide to me as an end user.
So many apps use annoying and questionable marketing notifications that I'd say I have about 70% of app notifications disabled globally (because the app itself does not allow disabling notifications / has no granular control).
Am I understanding correctly that iOS notifications have to go over apns unless on the same local network as the HA server? I do appreciate that android makes this possible for ha and signal (and others) in all cases, it should be up to the user to choose centralizing the connection vs. slightly worse battery life.
>an iPhone could not afford to let every installed application maintain its own background poll against a remote server. The proposal...a single persistent TLS connection from each device to Apple, over which any registered third party could deliver alerts.
I thought apps were sending notifications locally in the device. Like, if a messaging app receives a message, there's a network call for that. Then if the messaging app wants to tell the user they received a message, it can just hit a local API for that, right?
Is the pattern actually that the app makes another network call to the notification service to register the notification, which makes another network call to the device to deliver it?
yeah this is what author hints at with "Push as a battery problem". Apps are limited by default in what they can do in the background due to this, so most apps are in a suspended state not making network calls when you are not using them. To avoid the app having to keep running this stuff is delegated to OS which tells the app, "hey I have a push for you wake up and handle it!" You can send pushes locally but because of the background limitation it is not practical for unpredictable events like messages coming in.
The first thing I do on every new phone is to turn off 99% of notifications. Messaging ones and email are first to go. I cannot stand the constant beep-beep.
Personally, I don't see a few permanent connections as a problem. My GrapheneOS phone is degoogled, and therefore apps such as Signal fall back to a WebSocket connection. Battery life is probably somewhat impacted, but I use too few apps to notice. And in any case, this is much better than allowing Google to stick its nose into my business.
Yeah I'm disappointed this isn't pointed out in the opening paragraph. It's fair to critique Google for convincing devs that fcm is the only option, and obviously iOS is designed for Apple to do whatever they want, regardless of the owner's wishes, but Android does have other, viable, options. iOS and Android aren't equally bad here.
IMO they should be doing way more to control push notifications, there's so much more control they could give the user, and many clear violations of their policies.
One of the best apps I've bought for android is buzz kill which lets you set rules around notifications. I have cool downs on family chats and social media so it doesn't keep buzzing when things kick off, filter Amazon alerts to only "we're two stops away" and "We've delivered" messages and dismiss the rest.
I have custom buzz patterns and sounds for urgent alerts and rules that batch notifications depending what WiFi I'm on, time outs on things that don't matter after a few hours etc.
My notifications list is now way smaller and far more relevant.
Also quickest way to sort out notifications is to take your phone off silent. Hearing everything coming in, you see more when it you can then decide if the notification should make noise, or exist at all on a per app basis.
If my phone buzzes and I look at it and the reason was dumb, I delete the offending app and leave a 1 star review. I don’t know which of these steps are loadbearing, but my phone has gotten much quieter.
I see the point. But honestly I am more concerned about having to constantly fight to turn off all permission allowances every time I install an app.
And the moment I have some faith and trust an app that I deem important, I get promotional junk as a "notification".
I would really like to have notifications allowed on certain apps like parking, or health etc., but all they seem to do is abuse the trust they are given, meaning I turn them off.
So where I agree with this author is certainly that more power belongs at the user.
I can't believe this still isn't a thing outside of GrapheneOS. Being able to revoke network permissions is a fundamental security and privacy tool that's willfully left out of both Android and iOS.
There's zero reason not to include it as a toggle.
> certain apps like parking, or health etc., but all they seem to do is abuse the trust they are given, meaning I turn them off.
I've found that live activities on iOS helps with this quite a bit. Let's me keep notifications disabled on parking apps and DoorDash while still getting the tracking info I want in the live activity & dynamic island.
Otherwise, yeah, you just can't trust anyone to be respectful with notifications. Phone & a messages whitelist via focus modes are the only notifications I allow on my phone.
Isn't this a strategic going for years now, throwing random notifications to make the user use more the app?
I for once, block notifications from apps I don't want, because I don't like getting bombed with stupid ads etc.
I don't think I've got a push notification in awhile. Few months ago I switched to Lineageos and started using the web browser instead of apps. It's peaceful.
I still get notifications (SMS, email, calendar, etc) but nothing pushed
The real solution is to allow users to own their push solution, and for it to become more commonplace among apps to support alternative push providers such as Unified Push. Molly, the FOSS Android Signal client supports this configuration.
My Android phone has a long list of toggles under notification for each app. I am genuinely interested to make good use of that to optimise what notifications I recieve, but I am clueless about what each of them means . For example: badges, floating notifications, permanent notifications, unified support, alerts, etc.
“ None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified”
So … mission accomplished then? This is pretty much how I would like it to operate.
Probably depends on the user. Along with push notifications for almost every app on every one of my devices, I disable the summarization.
For me the notification is the point, and the point of notifications to me is that they deserve my attention. Of the vanishingly few apps I install these days, almost nothing can say it deserves my attention. Even my bank doesn’t get those privileges.
The interaction is: marketers keep trying to abuse these systems and platform owners and users keep having to find ways to fight them off. Some of these efforts have unfortunate downstream consequences (like bad summaries).
For whatever reason, I get very few push notifications on my phone. Compared to my days at Blackberry, it's probably 10% as frequent that I get interrupted by my phone.
So good for me.
But there's some really scary stuff in here happening to other people that I'm not even aware of.
Massively overlong article that really could have done with an editor. Although obviously editors cost money, and I'm reading it for free, so I can scarcely complain. Nevertheless, some concision would have been appreciated.
I'm very unclear to me what the thesis of the article actually is. Yes, push notifications run through the vendor's servers. Yes, Apple fucked up hard by modifying the text within them - and I contend that such modification is impossible to perform automatically without unreliability becoming the norm.
The author also appears to believe that "broadcast copy" - otherwise known as Spam by those who like to write slightly more honestly - is a legitimate use of push notifications. It is manifestly not, and any app that tries will at the very least be immediately silenced. I wish I could find the tweet that put this sentiment more entertainingly than I ever could.
If App developers continue to abuse the push notification system in this way, Apple and Google will be forced to take steps to solve what becomes an end-user's problem. Yet another tragedy of the commons.
It’s a through line from an article I posted last week about the similar situation in email, which has a lot more depth as inbox providers have substantially more published papers and patents showing their intermediation.
The next post will be highlighting the difference between the actual state of the art techniques being deployed by large tech co’s (LinkedIn and Pinterest, for example) vs what’s available via commercial marketing providers and how most marketers don’t even make the most of the tools they pay for.
> The author also appears to believe that "broadcast copy" - otherwise known as Spam by those who like to write slightly more honestly - is a legitimate use of push notifications. It is manifestly not, and any app that tries will at the very least be immediately silenced.
Cool man, but it might surprise you to find out that people knowingly opt into receiving this stuff and actually consent to it.
> Cool man, but it might surprise you to find out that people knowingly opt into receiving this stuff and actually consent to it.
Consent is more than pressing 'Allow' on a notification pop-up. It's often not even informed consent, as those pop-ups are usually a part of some onboarding flow where users are just trying to get to the value the app promises and pressing 'ok' to everything.
Even if people do indeed want notifications at the time of the ask, one doesn't really know if the message provider will wind up spamming, that's a matter of trust. And once opted-in, even if the users no longer want notifications, a lot just don't know how to turn them off. People are often incredibly accepting of sub-par experiences like this because of the friction and capability demanded of them to opt-out. My parents get tons of spam notifications that would pass your test of 'knowingly opt into receiving' but that when asked they say they do not want.
Finally there's myriad dark patterns that tons of apps use, like changing and resetting notification preferences among others.
I'd hazard a guess that observed opt-in rates far exceed users actual desires, so I wouldn't put much stock in them. I do agree that there are some people that like them tho!
Fwiw I've worked on both the delivery side (OneSignal) and developer side (Margins) so I've lived these choices and trade-offs. My believe is in terms of power dynamics, senders generally don't deserve their power to interrupt and should not possess that power. At best, they offer opportunities, which ideally are verified somehow prior to being presented to users. I'm happy that devices and ecosystems are moving in the direction of triaging and filtering sender content, as power needs to lie in the user's holistic, most pre-frontal cortex driven expression of their desired experience, and not just one moment's opt-in button they pressed.
Thank you for writing the article, good discussion points.
The default must be pull, unless opt in for push. At the moment I would like notifications once a day or once a week for most apps. But instead I ha e turned it off completely, because of the push abuse. If I can configure to pull all the notifications on a predetermined cycle, it makes my life even better
I've had all notifications turned off expect for my immediate family (parents, wife) for years now. I'd get rid of my phone before going back to getting buzzed and dinged constantly.
iOS really needs LLM-based notification filtering. This would take care of promotional notification spam overnight. It would even enable fine-grained user filtering like "notify when - someone is messaging me about plans for today."
Channels are a great first level, and iOS absolutely needs to implement an Android-tier version of this.
But channels continue to be abused, even on Android. When all deterministic controls fail...
Secondly, channels are set by the developer (or platform). In an ideal world, I want to define whatever channels I care about, and turn them on/off at will.
I need a feature to block my bank's incessant nagging about cash-back deals while keeping the ones about transactions.
Right now on iOS there is no way to do this. And yes, I've explicitly turned off the cash-back deals notifications in my bank app's settings and that is completely ignored.
I don't know if there's an iOS equivalent, but Buzzkill on Android is really great for this. I set up filters to hide all the stupid Amazon ad notifications.
> 2 to 5 notifications per week is the optimal range for most apps and exceeding it materially increases uninstalls;
Wow. Y’all must be much more tolerant of your time being wasted than i am. One notification from an app I didn’t need/request/expect is cause for deletion. 2-5 per week would be enough to go and rate the app 1/5 on the AppStore and actively recommend everyone I know to delete the app.
> visibility into all of this is poor by design, and getting worse.
Good! I pay Apple big money to protect me (user) from you (abusive app developer, abusive by definition since you talk about my attention as if it were your property)
Predictably people are moving back to SMS for notifications. Not as nice for linking to your app but once the user opts in you don't have to deal with the Apple/Google complexity.
I live a push-notification free life, aka no push ever.
I also saw elderly people receiving such notifications and
not knowing why. Then I realised that this system is designed
to abuse the elderly, so I am now totally against it.
Google/Outlook/etc intervening with email was a good thing and saved email with spam filtering and content ranking. Mobile Carriers have not effectively intervened with phone screening and voice calls are practically dead.
Intervening with push notifs could be a good thing. Notifs are approaching the point of uselessness. I turn all off by default now.
Oh man... I just wish someone invented some form of organization where workers could negotiate with employers in a more equal footing by doing this in a collective way.
If my phone interrupts me, it should either mean someone genuinely needs my attention right now or it should not be disrupting me at all. That's my notification set up.
Apps allowed to receive push notifications
Phone, Messages, Whatsapp, Apple Health, [brand] bank.
That concludes the list.
There is no reason any other app needs to be able to instantly ping me. Most apps are not notifying you because something matters; they are notifying you because they want your attention.
I do not need notifications about streaks, sales, recommendations, delivery updates etc. All that can wait until I choose to open the app. It is not urgent enough to justify interrupting me.
Yeah, this entire article is pretty transparent that it's from the sender perspective, and worried about platforms taking over "sender control".
Who is he kidding? The vast majority of apps have absolutely proven they can't be trusted to respect your attention. From my perspective, the more roadblocks the platforms put between unnecessary notifications and my phone, the better. And I don't think Apple or Google are some sort of heroes here, but I do believe their incentives better align with mine than the marketing department of some app I was forced to download because I bought a ticket once or something like that.
Notification categories are like mailing lists now. You may have unsubscribed from the daily deals email but you're still going to be auto subscribed to every new slightly modified category in perpetuity. Unless you fully disable notifications for an app (in Android at least, in my experience), new enabled by default notification categories are added all the time.
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I recently had to setup Microsoft Authenticator. It refused to register a code unless I enabled notifications.
You are a two factor app. I should never be in a situation where there is an unexpected login I need to verify.
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This is all a consequence from running software that doesn't respect you and notification are just one of many symptoms.
I'd rather choose better software than let Google/Apple decide what software running on my device is allowed to do.
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> From my perspective, the more roadblocks the platforms put between unnecessary notifications and my phone, the better.
I know lots of apps behave badly when it comes to notifications but I'd still prefer if the apps controlled the level of notifications they sent. I could, of course, reduce that client-side, but I don't see why I'd want Google or Apple or any other intermediary see or control the notifications.
If an app behaves inappropriately, I could uninstall it. If a gatekeeper like Google or Apple prevent an app from sending me notifications, I'd have to change my OS, usually my hardware, too.
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> I do believe their incentives better align with mine than the marketing department of some app I was forced to download because I bought a ticket once or something like that.
Align better for now. It will get enshittified.
I try very hard to avoid installing apps specific to a particular business or organisation. So far I have only had to install a government app and some from banks. Even those are avoidable (but it would be very inconvenient to do so).
The biggest problem are apps that do both. For example, I want Uber to notify me when my driver has arrived, but I don't want it to notify me when they have a special 10% discount on my next 5 rides. It's not straightforward to block one but not the other.
If I order an Uber, I already know it is coming. I was the person who ordered it.
This is how taxis worked for decades before smartphones existed. You phoned for a taxi, then remained vaguely aware that it would arrive shortly.
The question is whether a single “it has arrived” notification is worth the surrounding noise: “driver accepted”, “driver is nearby”, “rate your driver”, “here’s 10% off your next ride”, and so on.
In most cases, it is not. The useful information is either already obvious (you can see the car outside) or you have re-opened the app to check where they are.
Operational and marketing notifications should never share the same permission. Until that is enforced at the OS level, I will treat them all as unnecessary spam.
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For me, it's quite straightforward. If an app makes an unsolicited spammy push, it's notifications-off. No exceptions.
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It's a failure of iOS architecture to not force applications to tag each notification with labels. App developers have to build notification management themselves for fine grained control.
Android has notification channels, but I'm not sure how widely it's used: https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/compose/notificatio...
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No one willingly says "yes" to advertisements, but people will say "yes" to important-updates(-and-advertisements).
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Apple should add "promotional notifications" section to iOS, then ban everyone who don't put their marketing bs into that category
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Some banks also do this, and offer no way to segregate marketing from utilitarian push notifications. This is borderline abuse of trust IMO.
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periodically open the app every few minutes or so. once the driver is 5 minutes away -- go outside and wait.
it's a tradeoff. eliminating notification spam means behaving more synchronously when booking a taxi. i don't mind waiting outside for five minutes. especially if i'm not getting a random ping when i'm definitely not booking a taxi :shrugs:
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Most people aren’t aware but there are laws that require granular notification consent. For example the GDPR has it. I’m currently fighting with a major bank and educating them about my rights. I want to receive security related notifications but not get spammed by “get a loan up to 50k without lifting a finger” type of bulls*. Send send this almost every week..
The user legitimately considers the application as hostile - hence sandboxing... Notification spam filtering is now the obvious need at the sandbox's edge, with the whole customizable arsenal we have come to expect for our inbound mail. Of course, Google will not cooperate with anything likely to reduce sacro-sanct engagement !
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I don’t know about uber specifically but most of the apps I use have a separate toggle for things like marketing. Maybe it’s an EU thing?
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Tell me use iOS without telling me you do. Android has separate notification channel toggles, so I've turned off the marketing ones. I was shocked and aghast when I spent a year trying to use an iPhone that it didn't do this. Part of the reason I went back to my trusty Pixels.
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Yep exactly this. The app developers are the problem, but Apple and Google are not helping here.
This. So much this.
And the worst part is that Apple could fix this in a heartbeat. Uber is straightforwardly in violation of App Store policies about "no advertising in push notifications", but a) they're too big to fail and b) Apple advertises via push notifications all the fucking time, so they have no leg to stand on here.
It's infuriating that the one thing the App Store monopoly could be useful for isn't even actually used in practice (if you're big enough, ofc, you and me get to eat shit if we try to evade App Store policy).
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WellsFargo does that. Important notification and advert-BS on the same channel. If you block their notifications you don't get the near-real-time Zelle alert. Enabled you get what you want and also YOU MIGHT BE PRE-APPROVED!
On Android with notification categories it is, but iOS doesn't have that. Also, I think it's mostly a trust system. But Uber in particular does actually do it right, and you can just turn off promotional notifications.
I totally agree. Right now the apps that can notify me are phone, text, email, what's app, and a few bank apps. You are 100% right about turning it off on everything else.
I also stopped doing store loyalty cards about 7 years ago and it's been fantastic. I actually get a lot less junk mail and spam/"legit" marketing emails. I don't have a gob of cards to sort through.
Corporations should not speak unless spoken to.
"Marketing never met a communication system they didn't want to co-opt"
(I'm reminded of this every time a client want "WhatsApp support" in their (commercial) app, so they can "communicate with customers".)
But equally every user will have a different subset of apps they want notifications for.
For example shift workers need to know when they've been allocated a shift. Or when a shift has opened up (because someone scheduled failed to arrive etc.) One group of users consider this really important, another group of users treat it as spam.
But, per the rule above, unfortunately "useful notifications" can easily be subverted by marketing notifications. Yes I want to know my delivery driver is outside, no I don't want to know that you're running a special this week.
Unfortunately there's no way to solve this problem technically. Bad actors can (and definitely do) behave badly. But ultimately the system should work for "good citizens". In other words, the user should ultimately determine what they want to see of not. And if an app has "notifications on or off" as the only option then the user should ultimately determine that setting. Not Google. Not Apple.
Building society around the lowest-common-denominator just ends up sucking for everyone. We should actively promote good behavior, while allowing bad behavior to be punished. Not just banning everything "because it might be bad".
You're conflating "push notifications" with "being alerted about push notifications." I have many "important but not urgent" apps on my phone configured to just silently add their push notifications into iOS's notification center.
With an app configured to do notifications like this, no banner shows up at the time the app's notifications are delivered; and these notifications don't even show up visibly on the lock screen. You only see this type of notification if you choose to actively scroll down past the "timely" notifications that do get delivered onto your lock screen, to "catch up" on all your notifications.
Basically, these notifications are relegated to an "email inbox" that you can check or not check as you like. But unlike your email inbox, you can go "inbox zero" on your notification "inbox" whenever you like without worry, since notifications (unlike email) are inherently prohibited from being a critical path in an app workflow.
Just curious, what do you do with the increasing number of companies that use push notifications as a form of advertising venue, and how do you differentiate the security warning notification from your camera app from their special weekly annual sale notification?
The marginal cost of each notification is so low that companies simply spam users nonstop, and their A/B tests shows that the revenue is increasing. What's being lost though is that we're getting more and more agitated with these brands and their uncapped malicious behaviors. This is also true with their UI and UX as well, they keep adding banners with incredibly small close buttons, because someone will continue with the shopping after accidently missing the tiny button, and that's an added sale, who cares about 99% of users who are fuming with dissatisfaction, what are they going to throw away their $200-300 smart home device because companies abuse them?
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> Apps allowed to receive push notifications
> Phone, Messages, Whatsapp, Apple Health, [brand] bank.
Anyone else annoyed by the fact that you can set up do-no-disturb, with exceptions for certain phone numbers, but it doesn't work for apps like WhatsApp?
I remember a while back I also had this issue on iOS (maybe around 2022 or so), though lately seems to be solved and works as one can hope so. When you're making the exceptions, do you explicitly input phone numbers or some other method? I selected contacts from my contacts list and it does the job. This is for iOS in my case. I'm not familiar with Android, so cannot give any input there..
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Maybe it's for the best. The best practice is to have as few apps as possible. The moment an app is abusive with notifications, you know it's time to drop the app anyhow. A lot of people need that one final push to drop the app, so this could help.
My notification setup is more elaborate (for one, I do keep social media notifications on, but silent) but yeah I agree in general. It frightens me seeing some other people's notification shades where they have 20+ spam notifications from all kinds of things that I wouldn't even consider installing an app for, and they're somehow fine with it.
Apple and Google failed to make push notifications usable for the past decade. Most important notifications drown in a sea of absolutely irrelevant nonsense. It's a very primitive mechanism where many apps compete for very little screen real estate. Beyond "something happened!" there isn't a whole lot of information in most push notifications. They are mostly not very actionable and very vague about what actually happened. And "something happened!" just isn't very useful information to me. This has de-valued the whole notion of having notifications. Whenever something interesting actually does flash by, I often miss it or can't find it back.
The push notification UX is just beyond terrible and it just got worse over time as app developers tried abusing their super power of being able to interrupt the user at will and Apple and Google tried to get on top of that. The net result is something that's very mediocre for the handful of valid uses I have left for notifications. My list is similar to yours. Things like bank approvals, 2FA stuff, etc. are useful mainly as deeplinks into apps. But other than that, it's just not worth dropping whatever I'm doing and staring at my phone.
The most used apps on my Android phone (older Google pixel model) are Firefox and gmail and just a handful of other things. As a notification channel, my email inbox is actually far more useful than mobile push notifications. They are more actionable and informative. And I can individually unsubscribe them or filter them out and easily find them back. Most apps can do both and that makes the push notifications inferior and redundant.
> The most used apps on my Android phone (older Google pixel model) are Firefox and gmail and just a handful of other things. As a notification channel, my email inbox is actually far more useful than mobile push notifications. They are more actionable and informative. And I can individually unsubscribe them or filter them out and easily find them back.
There’s also substantially more filtering happening in the inbox which is mostly useful from a user perspective.
Yahoo literally wrote a paper more than a decade ago showing how they can model predictive causal chains for emails they expect you to receive, as an example.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2740908.2741694
Gee lets take a 5 inch screen phone and have every notification stack up in 1 inch worth of space. I really hate ios18. Too bad ios26 is even worse.
Same: Phone, Messages, Calendar, Apple Health... nothing else can send me notifications.
On my work I also disabled all notifications except for the calendar. Even slack message our main tool for communication is not allowed to send notifications. It is almost a productivity hack :P
Agreed.
And let's not forget focus modes... I have them that narrow greatly my default set of notifications, so I have a 3 tiers of notifications.
It's like the complaint I used to hear all the time: "Slack ruins work for me! OMG I can't work with constant interruptions!!" That is bewildering, because if that's how you feel, you haven't tuned your setup. Slack never interrupts me, yet I am response enough to slack messages. No one has ever complained about my response time. And I'm probably the most-messaged person on our Slack.
> if that's how you feel, you haven't tuned your setup
The withering cry of the software engineer "just tune your setup!" This is simply not a thing that people will do.
The defaults are so, so important. They are crucial. The vast majority of people rely on the defaults to be sane. The defaults should be sane.
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For Slack, I find just changing the default notification sound to a simple and subtle ding works well.
When I’m focused, I don’t hear it because it’s too subtle. But when I’m not concentrating on anything, it’s more noticeable and I don’t mind the distraction.
This might not work for everyone (“YMMV” and all), but I’ve personally found it a very effective yet simple solution.
If you are very present on slack, ofcourse you dont feel that you are interruped.
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I would say the same applies to background processing as well. A random app that I don’t interact with launching every minute and wasting everything from battery to network bandwidth is simply not acceptable, and most of the time they’re loading adds or doing some other stuff that serves me no good.
I wish I could set this as the user. Apple ties background app refresh to the frequency of use, but that sucks for self-hosted photo backups. I use Immich and I don't open it too often, so Apple breaks my chosen backup system for my photos.
I agree with your points.
That said, my view is now (not novel, or unique) that I am not the customer in so many cases. Any app or platform with the slightest hint of an advertising end-game restructures my usage as the product.
The customer is instead the sender (or advertiser). So, I can't expect ideal app behavior and usage based on my intentions because I'm sold (as the product) rather than the other way around.
Maybe a cynical view, and there are exceptions, but don't think I'm far off.
The worst are apps that bundle genuinely urgent notifications with maketing brain-manipulation promotional crap.
Uber is a notorious example. I do genuinely want Uber notifications for when I use Uber. I do not care about whatever promotion it pushes at me.
Exactly. Senders have earned the questionable reputation that they have because they rabidly want your attention whether you want to give it or not.
I used the Southwest Airlines app recently and allowed notifications so that I could find out about things like delays and gate changes (both of which happened on my trip). Less than a week later I'm getting ads for travel "deals" pushed as notifications.
Unsurprisingly, it was difficult to find the notification setting, which was on their website, not even in the app.
Might as well use a dumb phone
I don't get what you guys are doing to be so bothered by notifications. I get them on my wirst and even then it isn't enough to take away mental bandwidth.
My bank likes to show offers, like a 10% discount in tires, but I have no car. Perhaps tree or four irrelevant messages per day.
I have MouseTimer that is an alarm that is nice to show to kids when they must wait or do something for 10 or 20 minutes. It should be able to ring and sometimes show notifications.
I classify them even further.
I have broadly the same list as you do, but stuff like WhatsApp, Messenger, and other "non primary" communications platforms have silent notifications in the sense that they're not allowed on the lock screen or Home Screen. They simply display a notification counter.
Stuff I care about that I can't do anything about "right now" are allowed on the lock screen but quietly. That includes messages from the kids schools. Most is not even that important, like field trips "next week", but once in a while there's an "important" message I need to deal with.
Health? Why, are you worried you'll miss the notification that you have a heart attack?
As for Whatsapp, maybe you're not in enough group chats that you still allow notifications...
You can mute group chats in whatsapp.
I also allow emails, but I'm very agressive at filtering promotion/junk emails with skip inbox rules: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en
I went even further and my small set of the most important applications runs in the background - rest doesn't have that privilege. I've treated my spare Samsung phone same way.
I also don't use Siri either beyond setting timers and lights in home and every application is also excluded from being "suggested". Apple for 14 years didn't bother to add support for Polish so it basically remains useless.
> Phone, Messages
At this point, I'm pretty much in some form of DND at all times. I have a very small list of people that I allow the device to notify me at any time for calls/messages. Everyone else gets silenced and I'll get back to them when I choose. All other apps have notifications disabled and I'm constantly nagged about it when using those apps
I disable all group chat notifications too, only direct messages trigger notifications for me.
Exactly. Same for me, except I don't have an iPhone and therefore no "Apple Health". I will take care of my own health, or not, on my own.
So I would say: only humans can send me notifications. That includes me in the case of 2FA. But no machine ever, for any reason.
I'm personally just at messages. And even then I make it clear I respond when I want to. Only phone rings/notifications I get are for those in my contact list.
Take your phones back. Life is immensely better these days.
Fully agree, the apps are to blame for misusing notifications for marketing and ads, they are the ones doing this to themselves.
Your position is that of any normal human. Google is committed to evil however, just look at how playstore notifications are tied to sales spam. Want payment notifivations? Gotta take the ads as well, not seperate toggles, one toggle. Drink liquid shit you tech peasant. Oh? this hostility drove you to f-droid? We'll unilaterally decide every device r belong to us, so we can disable competition we dont approve of. Welcome back to the liquid shit trough, peasant.
There ought to be a flag to group all such notifications together and present them when the user wants to get to those notifications.
I have it turned off for my bank. For some reason Bank of America doesn't allow me to sign in with Face ID. I always need to get a text. Only reason I keep them is because I like a brick and mortar bank nearby.
Attention(/time) is our most valuable resource. Protect it ruthlessly.
if a app messages me it is uninstalled. we have too many installed apps anyways.
I have my phone always in Do Not Disturb. That's it.
It's absolutely disgusting how most tech companies use notifications as an advertising or addiction building channel.
On the rare times I use an app like uber eats, I uninstall it directly after because the app sends multiple adverts a day through the notifications. I want a notification purely to tell me the driver is almost here. And nothing else.
Phone, Calendar, Health - that's it for me
I've noticed a priority inversion in recent iOS. Want to send me an SMS that matches a ban-list regex from a third party app, from a foreign phone number / obvious spam farm? No problem. The app to block you was auto-uninstalled, and the iOS notification filter will mark your message with the highest possible priority.
Want to continue a 300 message thread that I've been responding to? You're listed as my emergency contact, and called multiple times? Fuck right off. Straight to spam.
It's almost enough to get me to carry a second dumb phone or grapheneos device just so I can text and receive phone calls.
For me I definitely need Calendar and sometimes Clock (alarm). iOS is constantly freaking me out by prompting me whether or not I want to continue receiving notifications from those apps. To me those apps exist entirely for the purpose of generating notifications and it terrifies me that by repeatedly popping stupid questions like that, I'm going to accidentally answer wrong and effectively delete my most important app accidentally. It boggles my mind that somewhere someone thought Clock and Peggle were basically on equal footing here.
Spot on.
To your list, I would add a calendar and reminders app.
I feel like this article reads like the author is upset that Apple + Google prevent / control certain types of notifications (read: spam)
> Cross-sell, upsell, education and discovery can work on push
Push notifications should only be for transactional notifications. I don't want another inbox for junk.
Agreed. I have a doc appointment app, where I like the notifications to be on for reminders etc.
Lately they started sending marketing messages through that channel. Now I’m sure it’s possible to turn off the marketing messages. But I bet most people don’t know and won’t change that. It’s super annoying.
Same for things like Uber.
I do want to know when a car is arriving.
I don't want messages asking if I'm hungry.
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> I’m sure it’s possible to turn off the marketing messages.
Uber may have that functionality, but a surprising number of other apps don't - for example Makro, Tops, and 7/11 Thailand, three very popular Thailand retailers, use notifications for when an order is out for delivery, about to arrive, etc. But they also send constant promotion notifications every day, even with audio alerts enabled.
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I absolutely hate medical marketing. I recently decided to switch dermatology practices over a combination of bad data management, unwelcome marketing for cosmetic dermatology products, and unsolicited SMSs. I never consented to receive marketing or texts (or to lose my data in a data breach, or to be billed for the in person services by practices other than the one from which I received services and ignored unopened as spam because I didn’t recognize the sender, etc…)
But I digress.
And soon, those appointment reminders might quietly be dismissed by your phone without you being any the wiser.
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I wish Apple would force app developers to implement different "channels" for promotional notifications vs transactional - so that you can pick and choose which ones you want.
In-app notifications settings should do this if they are trustworthy.
The "you" in the title's reference to "your push notifications" is not the user, it is the marketer. That tells you everything you need to know about the value of this piece.
Not upset, but increasingly concerned that all channels are being intermediated by big tech.
Something might come of introspecting why such controls are being built and desired by consumers instead of trying to frame everything as a "big tech evil!!1" narrative.
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Depends. Blackberry 10 hub was strongly designed as a shared inbox instead of a loose system of notification like ios or android.
And it was awesome.
I've definitely had notifications I consider spam direct from Google before. Apple/Google are not trustworthy.
Yeah these channels used to be respected in that way.
And then app developers discovered that hooks like "look what you missed" work on users and so now we all have to get them in the same category.
>discovery
I can’t think of a single app I want a “Discover” tab on anymore. The moment you include one is the moment there is someone trying to game it. I definitely don’t want push notifications trying to show me something new. I’m hardly lacking in distractions
(Yes I am sure somebody can give me an example of a good use of Discover but you get my point)
> (read: spam)
is it unironically incomprehensible to you that the owner of the device should in the one who gets to decide what is and isn't spam? it's not email where you can get bombarded with shit from any random server - you can mute or uninstall an app.
It should but apps don't let us decide.
An intermediate seems to be trying to fix it.
Is it ideal? No. But it's the spammers who are to blame.
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That's not entirely fair to the author as the article also states that the consumer being in control is a must:
> Every step subtracts a degree of sender control. Some of it passes to the user, and that is a good thing: a person deciding what is allowed to interrupt them is the channel working as it should. The rest passes to the platform, and that is the part that should concern a sender, because the platform's judgment is opaque, unappealable, and increasingly made by a model rather than by a setting the user chose.
A platform has essentially two "clients" - the user and the developer. Without both, it wouldn't exist. And it is in the interest of both that the platform should have very limited arbitrary authority over them. Nobody can deny today that the platform owners today have too much power over their users and their developers, which makes it easy for them to commercially exploit them while undermining their rights. We need regulations and standards (for interoperability, which is one of the arguments being made) to counter this.
Been an app developer since 2009, worked on Android for 6 years at Google. Push notifications suck, users hate them.
Simultaneously, I cannot match the pull quote, an argument summary, to their argumentation. IIUC if the reword patent / Apple’s summarizing disappear there’s 0 reason to say it wasn’t control passing purely to the consumer.
So I’m left a bit empty as the high-minded purpose has little backing, and thus comes across as bloviating.
I’m constantly amazed how passive people are with things that steal their attention
My phone is in do not disturb mode 24/7. If your app notifies me about something pointless, it gets deleted and I start using your website instead
I have a mail rule that moves any email with the word “unsubscribe” out of the inbox into its own tagged area. Every few days, I go in and unsubscribe to everything that’s arrived.
Whenever a retail point of sale worker asks for my details or phone number or asks me to sign up to their club, I ask if there’s a discount. Because if there’s no discount - they get no details. It’s a simple exchange; offer to pay a fair price for my details and I’ll consider it. But so far my time and details are worth more than any retailer has offered to pay.
That unsubscribe rule is genius. (Obvious in hindsight, as the best things are.) Thanks for that.
if you're in Gmail this filter works really well for me:
("list-unsubscribe" OR "unsubscribe" OR "list-id")
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With the retailer asking for a phone number, I don’t see how it would ever be worth even entertaining. They will give you a discount once, then have and potentially abuse your information for years to come.
That's precisely why I don't ever accept the bribe. If I don't like the non-discounted price, then I don't buy it. Now they neither get the data nor the sale.
What's frustrating is that a lot of grocery stores do this. If you sell something absolutely necessary, such as basic foods, you should not be allowed to do the whole "mark it up to mark it down" strategy.
Also, a tip for most grocery stores (at least in the US): enter in any area code plus 867-5309. Chances are high that somebody has registered it. It's better than sharing with a family member because so many people are using it, the data becomes less useful.
Alternatively, ask the clerk to "use the store card". Usually, they will oblige.
You can make an email rule to filter those messages to trash.
I have my phone set to only ring for people in my address book. It’s probably time to do something similar for email. Not in my address book? Straight to trash.
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Yes - and a fair price would incorporate that.
Hence I doubt retailers will ever consider offering a fair price.
I made a more advanced version of the unsubscribe thing to kill all unnecessary notifications from email. I made it open-sourced:
https://unfuck.email
> passive
I get your point and see it as valid, yet to nitpick most people don't feel they have a choice.
Not answering the phone or replying to people's messages is a no-no to many, which sets them in an arms race against spammers and social apps trying to get them from all fronts. And they get frustrated by us living in no-disturb land 24/7.
I don't know it could be solved, but I feel for them.
For sure - some folks have to unwind expectations they’ve let themselves be under around responsiveness to messages.
Feels like an education issue rather than a tech issue.. thoughts?
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Turn off all notifications except messaging and see how your day goes. It's not going to kill you. You quickly get used to regularly checking things you actually care about, and the rest has to wait until YOU care.
I've been doing this for many years, and none of my friends or colleagues are aware of it, and they don't need to be. Notifications don't help you respond quickly, they just grab your attention from things YOU wanted to do.
I haven't checked Discord today yet. I haven't checked my email. Whenever I do want to know if my friends wrote me, or if I have some new bills, or if I need to follow up on something, I will open the respective app and deal with it.
I can put my phone next to me for hours and not get distracted.
> You quickly get used to regularly checking things you actually care about, and the rest has to wait until YOU care.
This was the biggest thing for me. Before, I was paranoid that if I turned off notifications, I'd miss something important. As though I didn't miss notifications anyway.
Getting used to regularly checking (important) things also has two wonderful side effects (at least it did for me):
* My "mental notification system" got better. Because I was less dependent on my phone doing it for me, I developed the skill more on my own. * The apps and services that I checked less and less frequently became more obvious in how unimportant they were to me altogether. I have far fewer apps and accounts now, making me MORE punctual overall.
Whatever has replaced the Bulk Collection of Telephony Metadata Under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act informs the architecture of the Apple Push Notification, Firebase Cloud Messaging, etc. Apple owns the persistent connection to every iPhone, and only APNs can wake your app. So "self-hosting" here means running your own provider (the backend that decides what to send and hands it to APNs) instead of paying a third party like Firebase Cloud Messaging, OneSignal, or Pusher to do that for you. The last mile is never yours however. Any architecture that routes everyone's traffic through a small number of identity-aware intermediaries is, by construction, a bulk-metadata collection system waiting for a legal instrument.
[2] In December 2023 Senator Ron Wyden disclosed that the U.S. government and foreign governments had secretly compelled Google and Apple to turn over information from push notifications, including communications metadata and sometimes content. A detail that should bother any developer: app developers have no way to stop the practice if they want to send notifications on the platforms iPhones and Android rely on. Apple had been gagged from disclosing it until the program became public, after which it said it was updating its transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests. So the architectural hypothesis isn't speculative — it's the confirmed mechanism, differing from Section 215 mainly in domain (apps vs. calls) and legal vehicle (ordinary subpoenas, FISA orders, and NSLs rather than the specific business-records theory of §215)
[1] "Its just metadata". Thanks Obama! (joking of course, no single individual is responsible for these things, it is our collective political will and its the best we can do unfortunately)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUdm0QMDM0 [2] https://epic.org/sen-wyden-reveals-government-surveillance-o...
This part is factually incorrect:
"...a notification lives only in the notification centre, which clears, drops and summarises what passes through it and retains nothing reliably."
Your notification center reliably retains information. Something like an inbox does exist, just not in userland: https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/10/fbi-pulle...
> Over fifteen years the channel has been rebuilt around one assumption: the receiver's attention is a scarce resource the platform is obliged to defend. … As a sender you are on the wrong side of that assumption, whichever way the control moved.
Fascinating how the author openly frames the situation as the sender and receiver’s interests being opposed.
They are not necessarily opposed, just in tension.
A zealous guard of your attention will occasionally block something you would like to have seen.
That being said, yes most notifications are garbage and should be blocked.
A fairly uncharitable read, I’d argue it states that the platform is acting on the platform’s interest, not the user’s.
Speaking from the standpoint of a user: I consider my attention a scarce resource that needs defending.
To the extent a platform has the same assumption, its interests are aligned with mine.
To the extent a sender does not have this assumption, I want the platform to defend my attention on my behalf.
> None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified.
Sounds fine with me?
> For most of the channel's history they did very little of it visibly. The architecture was permissive of intervention; they simply chose not to intervene much. That restraint is what ended.
I guess it wasn't always visible, but they were intervening in some for or another since the beginning. At WhatsApp, push delay/suppression/coalescing was something we were always monitoring, and IIRC, it was part of the system since at least when I joined in 2011. If you don't work within the system, your users' messages don't get delivered timely.
Huh that’s interesting, do you have any further context on that? I’ve not worked on a product with anywhere near that scale before so monitoring has always been whatever I can get from commercial push platforms
I mean... record the time we first send a push message, when a client connects have it tell you if it's because it got a push or user interactive start, check the time between push and connection, add that to your choice of time series graphing tool. Graph by platform, and you can see when the platforms are delaying pushes.
Some of the delay will be ordinary things like their push service fell over or is unreliable (you also get some feedback when they don't accept push messages), or their push connection runs into silent NAT timeouts on some networks. But some of it will be things like you ran into an undocumented push quota, so Blackberry users don't get timely pushes at peak, etc. On client platforms where you have reliable background execution with network connectivity, you can potentially signal connecting clients if platform push isn't working well and have them switch to persistent connections until the push service comes back. But that was never an option for iOS; it hasn't been a reasonable option for Android since at least Android 6 when Doze was introduced... and app killers before then made it hard before then; and all the other platforms are dead. Now, push really just has to work.
AFAIK, Apple has always been willing to deprioritize pushes when you send "too many", especially when there's no user interaction; or when they added silent (voip) pushes to wake up the app, they only let you have a few silent pushes if you don't post a user visible push.
For ordinary async messaging, push latency doesn't become a big deal until it hits double digit seconds. For voice/video calls, you really want pushes to be as near to real time as possible, or the caller is gone before the callee phone rings.
I wish apple/google would implement better notification control - like the ability to turn off all marketing notifications, and a much better digest format
Notification Channels is the official way to do this on Android, but it's up to the app developer to categorize them properly. They have no incentive to allow you to turn off ads.
Actually, they do have an incentive to let you turn off ads. If they don't, many users will turn off notifications entirely. At least if they categorize them, some users will just turn off the bothersome ones.
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If you're on Android, I'll always recommend Buzzkill to add very granular rules for notification filtering. I set up all kinds of filters just for the Amazon app.
On iOS I assume you're sol, that notification system is unhinged to my eyes.
I just turn off all notifications for any app that sends me marketing notifications.
You are less charitable than me. Maybe I'll adopt your approach. I first give an app the benefit of the doubt and go into the apps notification preferences and see if I can fine-tune their notifications. If not, off for all at the OS-level. If yes, I tweak it, but if I get surprised by one later, off for all at the OS-level or uninstall. It's especially annoying because I don't have notifications shown on my home screen and need to unlock with a pin so if I go through the trouble of unlocking my phone to spam and I extra annoyed with the app.
That would be nice. I wouldn’t be surprised, as on-phone models get more capable, if we don’t see them start to build an “inbox” like we see with email where you can then start seeing much more heavy processing happening.
I think that's what the Notification Organizer on Android (maybe Pixel exclusive, not sure) does. It's sorting notifications into broad categories using AI and groups them in the notification shade.
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Too bad about the walled garden or you'd have this tweak already installed years ago.
While I have slight worries about what it means for users if Apple and Google notification services go down/censoring, I do appreciate the features that they provide to me as an end user.
So many apps use annoying and questionable marketing notifications that I'd say I have about 70% of app notifications disabled globally (because the app itself does not allow disabling notifications / has no granular control).
However, it seems that SOME self hosted services can directly notify you without APNS / FCM. As an example, see https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notif...
Am I understanding correctly that iOS notifications have to go over apns unless on the same local network as the HA server? I do appreciate that android makes this possible for ha and signal (and others) in all cases, it should be up to the user to choose centralizing the connection vs. slightly worse battery life.
The entire architecture here is surprising to me.
>an iPhone could not afford to let every installed application maintain its own background poll against a remote server. The proposal...a single persistent TLS connection from each device to Apple, over which any registered third party could deliver alerts.
I thought apps were sending notifications locally in the device. Like, if a messaging app receives a message, there's a network call for that. Then if the messaging app wants to tell the user they received a message, it can just hit a local API for that, right?
Is the pattern actually that the app makes another network call to the notification service to register the notification, which makes another network call to the device to deliver it?
yeah this is what author hints at with "Push as a battery problem". Apps are limited by default in what they can do in the background due to this, so most apps are in a suspended state not making network calls when you are not using them. To avoid the app having to keep running this stuff is delegated to OS which tells the app, "hey I have a push for you wake up and handle it!" You can send pushes locally but because of the background limitation it is not practical for unpredictable events like messages coming in.
What you're describing seems reasonable, but it doesn't align with what I quoted, unless I'm missing something, which I very well could be.
Having apps sleep and a daemon wake them to handle notifications doesn't require all of the notifications coming from Apple.
The first thing I do on every new phone is to turn off 99% of notifications. Messaging ones and email are first to go. I cannot stand the constant beep-beep.
Personally, I don't see a few permanent connections as a problem. My GrapheneOS phone is degoogled, and therefore apps such as Signal fall back to a WebSocket connection. Battery life is probably somewhat impacted, but I use too few apps to notice. And in any case, this is much better than allowing Google to stick its nose into my business.
Yeah I'm disappointed this isn't pointed out in the opening paragraph. It's fair to critique Google for convincing devs that fcm is the only option, and obviously iOS is designed for Apple to do whatever they want, regardless of the owner's wishes, but Android does have other, viable, options. iOS and Android aren't equally bad here.
IMO they should be doing way more to control push notifications, there's so much more control they could give the user, and many clear violations of their policies.
One of the best apps I've bought for android is buzz kill which lets you set rules around notifications. I have cool downs on family chats and social media so it doesn't keep buzzing when things kick off, filter Amazon alerts to only "we're two stops away" and "We've delivered" messages and dismiss the rest.
I have custom buzz patterns and sounds for urgent alerts and rules that batch notifications depending what WiFi I'm on, time outs on things that don't matter after a few hours etc.
My notifications list is now way smaller and far more relevant.
Also quickest way to sort out notifications is to take your phone off silent. Hearing everything coming in, you see more when it you can then decide if the notification should make noise, or exist at all on a per app basis.
If my phone buzzes and I look at it and the reason was dumb, I delete the offending app and leave a 1 star review. I don’t know which of these steps are loadbearing, but my phone has gotten much quieter.
I see the point. But honestly I am more concerned about having to constantly fight to turn off all permission allowances every time I install an app.
And the moment I have some faith and trust an app that I deem important, I get promotional junk as a "notification".
I would really like to have notifications allowed on certain apps like parking, or health etc., but all they seem to do is abuse the trust they are given, meaning I turn them off.
So where I agree with this author is certainly that more power belongs at the user.
Apart from this, what is most needed in both platforms is an application firewall - not every app needs to be allowed to connect to the internet.
I can't believe this still isn't a thing outside of GrapheneOS. Being able to revoke network permissions is a fundamental security and privacy tool that's willfully left out of both Android and iOS.
There's zero reason not to include it as a toggle.
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"having to constantly fight to turn off all permission allowances every time I install an app"
Are you really installing that many apps that this is so hard?
> certain apps like parking, or health etc., but all they seem to do is abuse the trust they are given, meaning I turn them off.
I've found that live activities on iOS helps with this quite a bit. Let's me keep notifications disabled on parking apps and DoorDash while still getting the tracking info I want in the live activity & dynamic island.
Otherwise, yeah, you just can't trust anyone to be respectful with notifications. Phone & a messages whitelist via focus modes are the only notifications I allow on my phone.
Marketing and advertising people ruin everything they touch.
>"But salesmen exist because customers don't actually know what they want"
"I want item ABC rev D with options X, Y, & Z – I do not wish to pay for undercoating"
>[salesperson looks at autist dumbfoundedly] "I'm not sure we can do that; don't even know what Y & Z are..."
"It's a valid configuration, please just do this for me."
----
Why does my state still require new car sales via a dealership model?!
Don’t forget the engineers and product folks who build these systems.
Isn't this a strategic going for years now, throwing random notifications to make the user use more the app? I for once, block notifications from apps I don't want, because I don't like getting bombed with stupid ads etc.
Am I supposed to feel sorry for developers? How did this make it to page one?
Seeing how they think about these things can be interesting.
I dont uninstall apps that annoy me with notifications, but I do disable them. Most of my notifications these days are news or texts. So be it
> that answers to the user rather than to you. You cannot out-shout it, and there is no appeal.
"now here's a list of how to get around that!"
I don't think I've got a push notification in awhile. Few months ago I switched to Lineageos and started using the web browser instead of apps. It's peaceful.
I still get notifications (SMS, email, calendar, etc) but nothing pushed
The real solution is to allow users to own their push solution, and for it to become more commonplace among apps to support alternative push providers such as Unified Push. Molly, the FOSS Android Signal client supports this configuration.
> Google followed in 2010 with Cloud to Device Messaging, then Google Cloud Messaging in 2012, then Firebase Cloud Messaging in 2016
Classic
I’m curious if anything meaningful changed along with these name changes or it’s mostly issues of branding/implementation.
My Android phone has a long list of toggles under notification for each app. I am genuinely interested to make good use of that to optimise what notifications I recieve, but I am clueless about what each of them means . For example: badges, floating notifications, permanent notifications, unified support, alerts, etc.
> What the marketer can see
> Your visibility into all of this is poor by design, and getting worse.
Great! This article is all good news, it seems.
“ None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified”
So … mission accomplished then? This is pretty much how I would like it to operate.
Push notifications are for the user, not the marketer.
From the author's blog: "I do Revenue Operation, helping Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams with data, process and technology."
You think there might be some sort of interaction between both facets there?
How is bad summarisation good for a user, for example?
Probably depends on the user. Along with push notifications for almost every app on every one of my devices, I disable the summarization.
For me the notification is the point, and the point of notifications to me is that they deserve my attention. Of the vanishingly few apps I install these days, almost nothing can say it deserves my attention. Even my bank doesn’t get those privileges.
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The interaction is: marketers keep trying to abuse these systems and platform owners and users keep having to find ways to fight them off. Some of these efforts have unfortunate downstream consequences (like bad summaries).
> You think there might be some sort of interaction between both facets there?
With the exception of one trying to extract currency from the other, in exchange for something of dubious value—no.
Vast majority of software should not be able to send a push notification. Send an email if you need to alert me.
For whatever reason, I get very few push notifications on my phone. Compared to my days at Blackberry, it's probably 10% as frequent that I get interrupted by my phone.
So good for me.
But there's some really scary stuff in here happening to other people that I'm not even aware of.
What I'm doing: leaving them all off
Massively overlong article that really could have done with an editor. Although obviously editors cost money, and I'm reading it for free, so I can scarcely complain. Nevertheless, some concision would have been appreciated.
I'm very unclear to me what the thesis of the article actually is. Yes, push notifications run through the vendor's servers. Yes, Apple fucked up hard by modifying the text within them - and I contend that such modification is impossible to perform automatically without unreliability becoming the norm.
The author also appears to believe that "broadcast copy" - otherwise known as Spam by those who like to write slightly more honestly - is a legitimate use of push notifications. It is manifestly not, and any app that tries will at the very least be immediately silenced. I wish I could find the tweet that put this sentiment more entertainingly than I ever could.
If App developers continue to abuse the push notification system in this way, Apple and Google will be forced to take steps to solve what becomes an end-user's problem. Yet another tragedy of the commons.
It’s a through line from an article I posted last week about the similar situation in email, which has a lot more depth as inbox providers have substantially more published papers and patents showing their intermediation.
https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/what-google-yahoo-...
The next post will be highlighting the difference between the actual state of the art techniques being deployed by large tech co’s (LinkedIn and Pinterest, for example) vs what’s available via commercial marketing providers and how most marketers don’t even make the most of the tools they pay for.
> The author also appears to believe that "broadcast copy" - otherwise known as Spam by those who like to write slightly more honestly - is a legitimate use of push notifications. It is manifestly not, and any app that tries will at the very least be immediately silenced.
Cool man, but it might surprise you to find out that people knowingly opt into receiving this stuff and actually consent to it.
> Cool man, but it might surprise you to find out that people knowingly opt into receiving this stuff and actually consent to it.
Consent is more than pressing 'Allow' on a notification pop-up. It's often not even informed consent, as those pop-ups are usually a part of some onboarding flow where users are just trying to get to the value the app promises and pressing 'ok' to everything.
Even if people do indeed want notifications at the time of the ask, one doesn't really know if the message provider will wind up spamming, that's a matter of trust. And once opted-in, even if the users no longer want notifications, a lot just don't know how to turn them off. People are often incredibly accepting of sub-par experiences like this because of the friction and capability demanded of them to opt-out. My parents get tons of spam notifications that would pass your test of 'knowingly opt into receiving' but that when asked they say they do not want.
Finally there's myriad dark patterns that tons of apps use, like changing and resetting notification preferences among others.
I'd hazard a guess that observed opt-in rates far exceed users actual desires, so I wouldn't put much stock in them. I do agree that there are some people that like them tho!
Fwiw I've worked on both the delivery side (OneSignal) and developer side (Margins) so I've lived these choices and trade-offs. My believe is in terms of power dynamics, senders generally don't deserve their power to interrupt and should not possess that power. At best, they offer opportunities, which ideally are verified somehow prior to being presented to users. I'm happy that devices and ecosystems are moving in the direction of triaging and filtering sender content, as power needs to lie in the user's holistic, most pre-frontal cortex driven expression of their desired experience, and not just one moment's opt-in button they pressed.
Thank you for writing the article, good discussion points.
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This article separately needs a summary at top.
Not everything needs to be summarised
The default must be pull, unless opt in for push. At the moment I would like notifications once a day or once a week for most apps. But instead I ha e turned it off completely, because of the push abuse. If I can configure to pull all the notifications on a predetermined cycle, it makes my life even better
Android is better because they allow you to change individual notifications right from the notifications themselves + granularly do it there also.
On iOS I have to find the right setting page and then all notifications are either on or off. Doesn’t make sense.
You can long press on the notification (or swipe left?) and pick "Turn Off..." among other options
https://support.apple.com/en-us/108781#manage-alerts
turn off is the only option basically, try an android phone bro
This only works if the app properly tags notification categories, no?
It also shows what category the notification was tagged with. An app that improperly tags notification categories gets one of two results from me:
1. Uninstall the app
2. If the app is non-optional for some reason, block all notifications.
I've had all notifications turned off expect for my immediate family (parents, wife) for years now. I'd get rid of my phone before going back to getting buzzed and dinged constantly.
I feel like the CAN-SPAM Act should apply to push notifications as well. I don’t know of any case that has tested this.
iOS really needs LLM-based notification filtering. This would take care of promotional notification spam overnight. It would even enable fine-grained user filtering like "notify when - someone is messaging me about plans for today."
Because Apple makes iOS, they could have a much more rigorous solution, like Google’s.
A nondeterministic, energy hungry classifier is inferior to writing a policy to define channels.
You really need both.
Channels are a great first level, and iOS absolutely needs to implement an Android-tier version of this.
But channels continue to be abused, even on Android. When all deterministic controls fail...
Secondly, channels are set by the developer (or platform). In an ideal world, I want to define whatever channels I care about, and turn them on/off at will.
I need a feature to block my bank's incessant nagging about cash-back deals while keeping the ones about transactions.
Right now on iOS there is no way to do this. And yes, I've explicitly turned off the cash-back deals notifications in my bank app's settings and that is completely ignored.
I don't know if there's an iOS equivalent, but Buzzkill on Android is really great for this. I set up filters to hide all the stupid Amazon ad notifications.
let me pour one out for all my homies in the marketing department...
> 2 to 5 notifications per week is the optimal range for most apps and exceeding it materially increases uninstalls;
Wow. Y’all must be much more tolerant of your time being wasted than i am. One notification from an app I didn’t need/request/expect is cause for deletion. 2-5 per week would be enough to go and rate the app 1/5 on the AppStore and actively recommend everyone I know to delete the app.
> visibility into all of this is poor by design, and getting worse.
Good! I pay Apple big money to protect me (user) from you (abusive app developer, abusive by definition since you talk about my attention as if it were your property)
That's why my next phone will neither be Android or iPhone.
I'm surprised that the article is this long with zero mention of Senator Wyden's concerns vis-a-vis Google and Apple's Push Notification system: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_...
I’m in the UK so I don’t catch all us news, good spot though
Also can the browsers finally acknowledge that allowing websites to request the ability to send desktop notifications was a terrible mistake?
How does this not mention alternatives? Here: UnifiedPush.org
And the author is also wrong that all notifications on my phone go via Google. Signal and Mastodon notifications are set up via Sunup.
They seem to have given up. Don't do that please...
This sure sounds like a marketer spending far too many words crying that they've lost surveillance on their customers. Boo hoo, don't care.
Predictably people are moving back to SMS for notifications. Not as nice for linking to your app but once the user opts in you don't have to deal with the Apple/Google complexity.
SMS will go exactly the same direction as push as far as being intermediated.
I live a push-notification free life, aka no push ever.
I also saw elderly people receiving such notifications and not knowing why. Then I realised that this system is designed to abuse the elderly, so I am now totally against it.
Google/Outlook/etc intervening with email was a good thing and saved email with spam filtering and content ranking. Mobile Carriers have not effectively intervened with phone screening and voice calls are practically dead.
Intervening with push notifs could be a good thing. Notifs are approaching the point of uselessness. I turn all off by default now.
What’s fun is all that “intervening” infrastructure they’ve introduced also doubles up as a big surveillance network.
Oh man... I just wish someone invented some form of organization where workers could negotiate with employers in a more equal footing by doing this in a collective way.
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