Comment by tambeb
20 hours ago
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.
It baffles me that they do this. I have to disable push notifications from Lyft entirely, so instead they send me ride updates as text messages, which surely must cost them way more money. Why not just introduce a "ride updates only" push notification category and stop this madness?
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Have you looked at the Uber app recently? 90% of it is promotionshit.
I am just looking for a fucking taxi.
Are there any VCs looking to give away a few billion dollars to disrupt the ossified, wasteful, poor customer experience taxi app market?
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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
Yeah, but I still see apps that don't implement those features. Mostly React Native/Flutter apps that don't bother implementing native features. On Android it's even more depressing.
I'm not worried about missing food notifications because they send me an email and a text (... and a fax and a hardcopy confirmation letter in the mail.)
On iOS atleast, Live Activities are separate from Notifications.
Should be, but not always. There are plenty of apps that still mix marketing and functional notification.
Hell, even Apple does this, especially on new devices.
[Settings]: Log in to your iCloud account to sync data.
Three minutes later…
[Settings]: You qualify for three free months of Apple Music!
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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.
On iOS Scheduled Summaries are really great. That's become my personal default on my phone. Scheduled Summaries roughly every 4 hours during waking hours and the default choice every time the question pops up for a new app is "In Scheduled Summary". I could see with some modest UX improvements Scheduled Summaries becoming the default for more people.
Heavy use of Scheduled Summaries does also lead to me wondering why there isn't a "default notifications to Ask/On/Scheduled Summaries/Off" global setting, though I would want that choice between Scheduled and Off at least.
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.
As far as i know my Whatsapp is muted and the mute is muted again. But it still rings for voice calls.
It's integrated somehow with the phone app on iOS, whatsapp calls show alongside GSM calls.
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