Comment by lanerobertlane
21 hours ago
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.
When they exist at all. Many apps that provide important notifications (like delivery tracking, drop-off time etc) put them under the same category as marketing stuff. You can't have just the transactional tracking, you have to opt-in for the marketing notifications as well.
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There’s the other direction too. You only get a couple toggles, and something you actually need is behind both, so you can’t not get all notifications
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iOS asks you if you want to allow notifications when each new app is started. You can just say no there and you're done.
It would be better if they were totally opt-in of course (1), but that's not bloody likely to happen.
(1) As in off by default with no questions.
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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.
I want scopes like Graphene has for storage scopes. I want this on my phone and browser - let the site/app think it has everything (cookies, storage, microphone, camera, notifications, whatever it wants) but it's all empty and does nothing.
Apps can know whether you granted permission?? That sounds like a security flaw.
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Tip: The iPhone Passwords App has basic TOTP functionality (manually create a password entry and click “Set Up Code”). I have a few dummy passwords which are effectively just labels for some login codes - it’s one less App to install.
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Okta has push as an option. Maybe msft has that too.
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AFAICT any TOTP app (FreeOTP+, Aegis...) works just fine with Microsoft services (or Google, etc). You don't actually need to install several TOTP apps.
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> I should never be in a situation where there is an unexpected login I need to verify.
Isn't that kind of the point? If someone else is trying to login somewhere with your credentials, your two factor will ping up?
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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.
Usually you don't have any choice of the software if you need to use a particular product or service.
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You mean it's a consequence of very large amounts of people refusing to pay for software, at essentially any other cost ...
Of course you could describe almost all of the internet that way.
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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.
This forces millions of users to individually monitor and fix dozens or hundreds of apps all the time - something most don't have time for and leads to an awful experience. Centralized controls are better for the user.
TFA discusses at-length how APNs and FCM are necessary intermediaries regardless, effectively creating a technical duopoly on 'push'. We all agree it would've been preferable for things not to have gotten this way, but here we are.
> 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.
The difference is that taxis would either give you a call that they were here or they'd just wait for. They don't care either way if you show up or not because the meter is running. The Uber is gone if you don't show up in 5 minutes. That is if you are lucky and the driver didn't mark themselves as "here" when they were 2 blocks away, which seems to be the norm here now.
Android has different types of notifications for apps and can have them filtered separately. Unfortunately, some app makers like Uber are bad about labeling. Google would need to enforce labeling so transactional and advertising notifications are separate.
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The point of notifications is the convenience of not having to constantly check your phone for every single app you have (amazon delivery? just eats delivery? uber booking? claude finished its task?).
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>If I order an Uber, I already know it is coming. I was the person who ordered it.
Which makes me wonder why you have notifications for your bank and Whatsapp enabled.
If I have an account, I know what transactions are coming out of it. I was the person who owned the account.
If I have someone's number, I know if I want to see messages from them. I was the person who gave them my number.
Seems really sill that you have notifications enabled for those apps. If you care about missing something, you'd just check them anyway.
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For me, it's quite straightforward. If an app makes an unsolicited spammy push, it's notifications-off. No exceptions.
Snapchat has to be the all time worst offender to me about abusive level of notifications. Luckily, you can turn them off, but holy cow batman, that's a lot of notification options to deal with.
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Yes. I’d rather live with the temporary inconvenience of needing to open the Uber app to check the status of my ride once a month than wade through notification spam on an intermittent basis forever.
Agreed, there’s a level of trust and as soon as the app breaks that trust with spam, notifications get turned off for that app.
I just refuse to grant permission as my default. If I ever feel like I’m missing out, I can turn it on later. Usually I don’t and if I do I quickly regret it.
Has been like this on my phone for a while. It's crazy when you see someone who hasn't blocked everything and their phone dings multiple times a minute.
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...
This is the kind of thing where we actually would like to have store policy enforce correct use of APIs.
No one willingly says "yes" to advertisements, but people will say "yes" to important-updates(-and-advertisements).
Then why is it whenever I watch someone use their computer they always accept cookies?
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Hundreds of thousands of people declaratively opt into receiving marketing with informed consent on a daily basis. Just because you don’t does not mean other people are like you.
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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
Yes! iOS 27 needs to categorize notifications using AI. Apps aren't supposed to advertise to you, but some don't allow for that distinction. I want notifications on for when my sandwich is arriving, but I don't want push notifications for a promotion. Some apps are good about this, others don't allow that granularity. I hate the all or nothing.
On the flipside, I have an app that sends notifications. We don't abuse it or use it for promotions, and APNS and Google's version works perfectly fine for us.
Apple isn't your friend though.
edit: downvote all you want. Fact remains that there is no way currently to block advertisement notifications and no disincentives for those who use them.
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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.
It's not borderline, it's absolutely crossed the line.
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:
I prefer temporarily toggling notifications on because I really don’t trust my internal metronome.
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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 !
I definitely run all my emails through an LLM filter and wish I could do the same for push notifications!
Except that they did. Android has notification channels. Now, I suppose we could argue that Google could be more ham-fisted about forcing apps to use them, but that's murky.
In fact, Uber on Android does use these notification channels. I just have "All Promotions & Recommendation notifications" disabled, and then "Taking a ride" channel enabled.
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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?
The modern pattern in anywhere that allows it is to have dozens of ambiguously labeled toggles for nominally different notification channels, described only by a minimally brief and maximally ambiguous label. All begin as active until the user, in frustration, goes in and exhausts themselves disabling individual options without being sure which one is going to turn off the one single thing they actually want to be notified about.
Then next month, you create a new notification channel for your new promotional messages because too many people opted out of the old channels. You default that new channel to opt in, to make sure the user gets their chance to experience it and share in the delight you mean to share with them.
Presumably, you continue this until you have hundreds of such toggles and presumably some kind of dedicated Toggle Engineering Department that oversees them all. Nextdoor, Meta apps, LinkedIn, and countless others all appear to be competing for the most such toggles.
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That's how the design is supposed to work. But marketing realizes that no one voluntarily receives ads, so they mix em.
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.
I use Android. Lyft put marketing notifications in the default notification channel on my device. If the Play Store were useful, they'd have banned Lyft until they fixed it. (haven't gotten one in a bit so maybe they did (or maybe I set something so that the app could only message me while it's active))
While iOS doesn’t do this at the OS level I’ve never seen an app that didn’t have these options. I assumed it’s required by Apple.
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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).
Instagram is the worst offender, I only want to receive message notifications, but I got notifications about inane random stuff I've tried to disable but it won't work. I ended up having to disable notifications altogether.
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I believe the App Store policy is you have to have a setting to disable ads. And Uber actually has it (though it has 8 different channels or so, apparently "Uber teen accounts" marketing was added recently).
I used the setting and am not getting Uber ads (only Uber ride notifications).
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Presumably enforcing this would trigger an immediate legal response where Uber claims Apple is using their monopolistic control over the App Store.
I would love if Apple enforced that rule, but they certainly don't
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.
"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?
On my Android, I aggressively mute or uninstall any apps that send push advertisements. I haven't seen one in more than 6 months now. If they think they need to advertise to me, I think I need to do without them.
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.
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.
> 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..
On Android I can "star" certain contacts.
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.
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.
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.
The other problem with Slack is that it just straight up... doesn't do what you tell it to. I have a set of notification settings that work for me. Slack goes ahead and just does something else, and you simply can't fix it to do what it's told. (Or couldn't, anyway; I've been off Slack for a while.)
Absolutely agreed.
How much time must everyone be asked to waste to “tune” a working set of applications to something reasonably sane for human beings.
Sure, what is sane for one human might not be for the next, but it’s not as if trends cannot be discerned.
How ridiculous would it be to be told “if you don’t want people constantly barging into your office, lock the door”?
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The idea that software like Slack could be setup as "one size fits all" is just ludicrous to me. We have options because different people require different settings.
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.
I don't know what that means.
I have no audible sounds from notifications. They don't go to my phone, with few exceptions. I get no popups. Yet, I am responsive. It was trivial to set up.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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 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.
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.
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 disable all group chat notifications too, only direct messages trigger notifications for me.
Fully agree, the apps are to blame for misusing notifications for marketing and ads, they are the ones doing this to themselves.
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.
There ought to be a flag to group all such notifications together and present them when the user wants to get to those notifications.
Attention(/time) is our most valuable resource. Protect it ruthlessly.
I have my phone always in Do Not Disturb. That's it.
if a app messages me it is uninstalled. we have too many installed apps anyways.
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.