Comment by hn_throwaway_99
19 hours ago
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.
The ridesharing apps are the most annoying about this. Yes I want to be notified when my uber driver is almost here to pick me up. No, I don't want a notification about yet another sale.
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I had to disable from Android settings all LinkedIn notifications. I check it from time to time but I haven't missed anything, nowadays LinkedIn is mostly garbage
On iOS atleast, Live Activities are separate from Notifications. So I can still monitor food or grocery delivery even though I have turned off their notifications.
Now a few apps have started sending notifications through WhatsApp because they have my phone number. e.g. Amazon
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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
Another sneaky behavior in Android is that categories that have yet to send a notification, which of course includes newly added auto-enabled channels, are collapsed under the 'show unused categories' button.
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.
I can see a certain category of people screaming that WhatsApp calls are broken if that were to pass… but I do agree that no one would scream louder than app makers wanting to retain their share of human brain attention.
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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.
This is basically required for clueless (and even not so clueless) users.
If there's a chat app I installed 3 years ago, with no intention of giving it camera access, and I suddenly need to use that app for a video call, I don't want to be stuck debugging broken camera issues for two hours. I'd much rather have the app tell me that it doesn't have camera access.
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They can, but there's an OS option that basically is "I'm going to say yes, but then effectively do no". Basically it'll pretend to the application that a permission is granted, but then just keep returning empty information or doing nothing with it. So notification perms would then be seen as enabled, but nothing is actually being send to the user.
Unfortunately Google isn't really exposing this to users, so you need something like App Ops or adb to set it up.
Yep. Just today I had a tram/bus ticket purchase app refuse to work unless I grant it Phone access.
Of course, that way they can so they can refuse to work until you uninstall or give in to their demands. There are other operating systems that present fake data at least.
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.
Unfortunately Microsoft Authenticator does more than TOTP and usually its not up to the user to decide which two factor implementation is accepted.
Some Microsoft setups ONLY allow Authenticator - can’t use 1pass etc. I have recently fallen into this pit
Okta has push as an option. Maybe msft has that too.
Key word there being 'option'. If you choose to use push as your mechanism then enabling it is obvious. If you choose not to the app should still work. You don't need push notifications enabled on an MFA app.
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.
Microsoft Authenticator is not standard TOTP, but their own private flavor.
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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?
Why would I want that? If it is not me, I am not going to allow the login. Making it a notification makes it more likely I could fat finger an approval.
I guess you can make the argument that you are then made aware of login attempts, but that feels more like something the host service should control.
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I saw a new marketing strategy recently: Someone tried to sign into something with my email. I didn't have an account, so they took the excuse to send me an email asking me to create an account.
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huh, is that why my google authenticator app pops up randomly? i always figured it was a bug in the app or in android.
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.
Yeah, the worst kind of software is the kind that interacts with the real world, particularly when chosen by clueless people at non-tech, real-world companies.
Conferences are great examples. You do want to submit your paper and go to a conference. To do that, they need your email address(understandable). That email ends up on dozens of email lists run by people who are doing "outreach" or something of the sort.
You can usually choose to "need" to use a particular product or service though. It's not always worth it, but there's a choice.
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.
It's a consequence of having platforms instead of protocols.
Suppose you want delivery notifications for your packages. The seller, by contrast, wants to spam you with marketing.
If getting the notifications requires you to install their app, they're going to shovel any spam into it that they can, and then they're writing the code that runs on your device. Whereas if the software on your device is controlled by you and the notifications are received using a standard protocol, you (or someone like uBlock) can create filters to only show the notifications you actually want and discard the spam.
But for that to actually work you need the software running on the client to be under the control of the user independent of which device or service they're using, and subject to competitive pressure. Otherwise the platform uses is as a means for lock-in and then filters your notifications in the ways that benefit them rather than you, or just does a lazy job because they know you've been deprived of having a lot of other alternatives.
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I don't pay for most of my software and yet it still respects me. Of course it also isn't made by large corporations with marketing and sales departments.
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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).