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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The OS could tell you instead. If it is a camera app, the OS could tell you on install, that you can't start the app without given camera access, because that's what the app is.
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.
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.
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.
I recently got an unsolicited OTP email from Microsoft, which led me to fear that someone had entered my password, but no: I eventually was able to confirm that the arrival of an OTP does not, in fact, require that someone enter anything beyond my email address. This is rather insane (I should not be having a blood pressure event due to Microsoft) but on the other hand I do understand the passwordless concept which is just a password-reset flow sans password-change. Perhaps a nice middle ground would be if the OTP email explicitly stated that my password was not entered.
Some providers (looking at you, Intuit) don't seem to understand TWO factor authentication and will allow someone to bypass your password if they can intercept the SMS or email, and treat it as a normal login.
This also happened to me about a week ago and I had the same reaction/discovery process you did. OT but I wonder if there was a recent ramp up in these attacks. It was done against an email I do not regularly use that was attached to my account as an alternate and haveibeenpwned confirmed was in a data breach back in 2020.
I would, but I don't need to know immediately. Plus you have the other vector of my phone sitting on a table and showing the notification to a person who can see it when they are trying to login as me.
I find it to be a poor default that sensitive data is shown on the lock screen. I change that setting as a first order of business whenever I'm setting up a new phone.
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.
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.
This has been going on since at least 2006.
Startups will "growth hack" by buying e-mail lists and feeding them into their password recovery tools.
A certain percentage of people will then follow the links and end up creating a new account on a service they had no interest in that now has their confirmed contact information, a new user, and a plausible reason to bombard them with marketing email.
I recently started getting emails from a company warning me that "I only had x days left to verify your account."
The account was supposedly registered for an organization whose name was somewhat similar to mine, so I thought somebody fat-fingered their coworker's email (the initial email was an invitation to create an account and join the org), but it might have very well been the tactic you described.
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.
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.
Unless the task is extremely well defined, protocols don't really work.
Imagine you're a shipping company and lock yourself into a parcel tracking protocol. You then decide to offer the innovative feature of parcel lockers, which need a code (or an action on your device) to open. How are you going to make the thousands of weird homebrew clients that people are using on their jailbroken Nintendo Switches or whatever to behave?
> 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 ...
In other words, you need the user of the software to pay for it's development. Since that won't happen ...
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.
> 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.
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.
iOS has the thing they call “time-sensitive notifications” which is a flag you put when submitting notification that is supposed to be Really Important Right Now. Unfortunately it’s not easy to mute everything that is not time-sensitive
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?).
> 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?).
My phone has been on DoNoDisturb since 2010 or so. Here's the reality: I don't check for any of those things. Delivery drivers can ring the door bell. If I'm very hungry I'll keep the app open and check where they are. I literally do not care to be notified about any of the things that apps want to notify me off.
Anyone who cares to reach me knows to ring the phone twice in case of emergency to get through DnD. Anyone else? The best time to call is text me. Or schedule a time.
As for Claude, the point of clankers is that they work in the background. The robot can wait, their infinite patience is a feature.
I guess you probably have no dependents and never been oncall then if you are on no disturb. For many people, having to poll the state of multiple ongoing tasks is time consuming itself or/and focus breaking enough that some apps are deserving of having notifications.
Manually polling multiple items as you go around your day is stealing valuable mental bandwidth that could be used in better things.
> Manually polling multiple items as you go around your day is stealing valuable mental bandwidth that could be used in better things.
I both agree and disagree with you. I disabled notifications for everything and found myself refreshing email too often. But if I have the notifications, I can get disturbed too often which also takes mental bandwidth.
For me I found the best tactic was to selectively enable notifications (whatsapp for just one person), and delete (not silence) everything else - I don't have email on my phone now - the temptation to check it is more than the need to have it. As for things like PagerDuty, I have it send an SMS and phone me instead.
A built-in notification system that everyone from your local politician asking for your vote to your Jehovah Witness recruiter can and does abuse. Way to waste your time.
I have notifications enabled for my bank because it may alert me to transactions which were not made by me, and because it does not abuse that permission to send me marketing spam.
I have WhatsApp notifications enabled because it is the primary way people communicate where I live. If my elderly mother messages or calls me, it will most likely be through WhatsApp.
Both of those notifications contain genuinely important or time-sensitive information which may require action on my part.
That's the distinction between them. A person contacting me is fundamentally different from a brand attempting to engage me. Transaction alerts are fundamentally different from “your order is out for delivery”.
The criteria is not “did a thing happen”. It's whether the notification gives meaningful new information that is important or time-sensitive, and requires me to take action.
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.
For me the worst is NextDoor. I don’t have the app installed, but they also have email notifications. There are seemingly 100 options and I turned them all off when I first made the account. Periodically they add new ones and auto-enable them for everyone. There is not universal way to shut them off, short of blocking them all together or deleting my account. The account was such a pain to setup that I’m hesitant to delete it, for the 1 time every couple years where it’s useful.
Even worse with ND e-mails are how they've absolutely perfected the cut-off character limit for what's being posted in your area. So my inbox is just perma-barraged with click-bait-y "This place on Smith Street has the best...", "Health officials are investigating an outbreak of...", etc.
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.
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.
Because companies are trying really hard to hide the "no" button: it's a single click to say "yes to all", but a safari through dialogues to say "no to all"
Same with websites like Youtube who don't understand a plain "no" but offer a fake choice between "yes, harvest all my data" and "ask me again later". That isn't consent, it's coercion.
Because people don't actually read what they are clicking on or even understand what they're doing. They just want to make the annoying banner go away. Same reason why people mash the next button when installing software.
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.
I mean, it's kind of an insurmountable obstacle. Why bother trying to unsubscribe when you're always gonna get spam anyway? It's just gonna come back.
Also, websites are shady. If you put in a required email, they'll usually automatically check a little box for you that says "allow us to ruin your inbox?" How helpful of them.
And, I'm not even convinced that checkbox does anything.
It's definitely not insurmountable. It just takes a little bit of inbox maintenance. Pressing unsubscribe and report when I have spam in the inbox, 5 seconds here, 5 seconds there. I still get spam, but it's minuscule compared to not doing this.
I just flag every marketing email as spam. It's much more effective than unsubscribing since it tells your email provider to just redirect everything from them to spam, and it causes trouble for the sender.
Exactly. Unsubscribe is for newsletters you consciously subscribed to but no longer want. Anything unsolicited that isn't a genuine one to one communication is spam and all the "unsubscribe" option does is verify that your email is active and will be able to receive more spam.
It's not insurmountable. Spam filters have been around for decades. They're pretty good. If I didn't expect the email, I train my spam filter that it's a bad email. There are a few that get through, maybe 1-5 a week, which require flagging.
The checkboxes seem to be a placebo. Sometimes there isn't one. Sometimes it doesn't do anything. Sometimes they say "updates on your order", which apparently also means future products you might want to buy a week after you receive your order. (Marketers' English seems like a foreign language to me).
I realise that CANSPAM as a law in the US is titled appropriately but I live in the UK where declarative opt-in is a must apart from a couple “soft” opt-in scenarios.
People. Opt. In.
Stop conflating your preferences with other people’s.
Is “informed consent” that little checkbox that is checked by default? Or is it the one with the wording that says something about “discounts and offers”? Or is it the one that’s enabled because it’s a “new category” that didn’t exist when the user signed up so why not require them to opt out? Oh, I know, maybe you’re talking about the “enable notifications? Yes/Ask Me Later” dialog that is pushed on them every single time they open the app.
I’m sorry but if you honestly think the number of users who receive marketing spam have expressed “informed consent” you’re fucking high. There is a multi-trillion dollar industry devoted to tricking people into opting into spam. Stop pretending these people are expressing any consent at all.
I live in the UK where we actually have sane regulations around this stuff, I realise laws are different and folks in the US in particular don’t have much protection from 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.
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.
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.
Send everything to the iOS notification summary which you then don’t look at. Uber and others can send time sensitive notifications and those don’t go in the summary. It’s basically a junk notification folder.
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 !
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.
>Now, I suppose we could argue that Google could be more ham-fisted about forcing apps to use them, but that's murky.
I disagree. What the is the point of forcing everyone to use the Google Play Store (or whatever app store on iOS) if the store doesn't stop spammers?
People complain about Uber, but Lyft does the same shit. I got a promotional notification from Lyft and could not disable it without disabling the main notifications that tell me when drivers were arriving.
If app stores were useful instead of just rent-seeking, they would kick Lyft off until they stopped doing that.
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))
Lots of iOS apps have the option, but ignore it and send you push ads anyway. Apple may require it to be present during app review, but they don't seem to enforce that it's used correctly.
Does Google actively police app's use of channels? Is there any mechanism to stop apps abusing "time critical" channels and sending unwanted marketing?
It absolutely makes sense (in a capitalist sense). Then you get more money/engagement/whatever on all of the other platforms.
It's the same reason Microsoft built functionality to let users in Europe have links open in their default browser instead of Edge but blocked that feature for the rest of the world.
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.
After all we wouldn't want the user to miss out on our promotion of 10% off your next refrigerator. They bought a refrigerator from us just 6 months ago, after all!
It also puts a throbbing highlight (for a few seconds) on whichever channel is associated with the notification whose gear icon you used as a shortcut into the channel list. At least for Pixel phones.
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.
Instagram drove me so insane with that that I spent a while searching through the app to figure out how to disable it. There's a way to do it, and for a while it worked; I only got notifications about things like direct messages and posts from a few people I specifically told it to send notifications for, but I never got the "recommended" posts.
Then I got a replacement iPhone and reinstalled Instagram.app, and it defaulted to "show you notifications for everything we think you might be interested in" again, and I was too lazy to spend all that time relearning how to disable those notifications. I disabled the notifications entirely and now I open the app once a week or so to check in.
I had to do the same thing with Facebook years ago. Now I open it once a month to see who from high school got married in the last month and click the little "heart" icon and scroll until I get bored (~2 minutes). Can't trust Zuck with notifications.
Instagram run their notifications via an auction mechanism (which I suppose makes sense for an advertising company that likely built a lot of RTB systems).
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).
Currently my biggest problem isn't ads, it's all the apps now will find ANY excuse to send you a notification in order to keep their "Daily Active User" count high.
You turn off more and more categories and they'll still find a reason.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We must, at some point surely, reach an inflection where even everyday people are sick of this shit and start smashing their phones right?
There has always been "unpluggers" [0] amongst technologists, but the vibes are bad and getting worse. I feel like that is getting more common between "normal" people I know, but maybe outside of my country town bubble its not happening.
I was thinking we're only one or two big influencers away from a cascade, but then the ultra-influencers are never really going to commit because its their livelyhood and saying throw your phone away is self-limiting on the viral aspect.
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’d recommend following your own train of thought, why is big tech so hell bent on intermediating the experience between their users and everyone else? They’ve done it for email, web search, mobile experiences, advertising, etc.
You want to use any of those things, you’ll have to pay their toll booth, figuratively or literally.
The chain of thought is quite straightforward. Functionally nobody wants an intermediary-free channel because there are adversarial entities on the other end.
I'm not a fan of Apple or Google, and it feels bad that all of our notifications pass through APNS or FCM. Megacorps shouldn't have control over our digital lives to the extent that they do, and anyone talking about this gets my full attention and support.
Except for marketers! I don't think there's a less sympathetic category of technologists, save for maybe CSAM peddlers.
You're upset that you can't get "visibility" into whether the bullshit ad you tried to ram down my throat landed on target? You're worried that I'm a dormant user and my phone will silently delete the spam you sent to try to hook me back into engaging with whatever worthless product you're hawking?
World's tiniest violin, buddy. Boo fucking hoo. Your last paragraph says the "senders" (read: spammers) who make it through the next decade intact will be, to lightly paraphrase, the ones who send messages the recipients actually wanted. You say that like it's a bad thing!
The computer is in my life because it is a tool that does the things I want. It is not an open mic for marketing sleazebags to try to sell me shit. May every single one of your attempts to invade my life and hijack my attention be flushed swiftly down the toilet.
If we had visibility, we would know what doesn't work and we would stop sending it. Almost like there are aligned interests there rather than a purely adversarial relationship.
Personally, all I've seen is marketers not getting the message and using it to perform A/B testing to come up with the basest ad they could possibly come up with to entrap more users.
Yes and that would be completely correct in many cases.
> Almost like there are aligned interests there rather than a purely adversarial relationship.
You might very well be the exception, but for something like 99% of marketing content that reaches me, our interests aren't aligned. First of all, they want to generate "needs" where there weren't any before and probably shouldn't be. A pizza ad produces the wish for unhealthy food. A fashion ad produces the wish for new clothes (even though I have enough) and probably even changes the societal dynamics of individual expression and personal style to be consumption oriented.
Second, even if I have a legitimate need for a solution, they still want me to buy their product, consume their media, give my attention to them. I, on the other hand, want to be informed by a neutral third party about the pros and cons of some product. Sure you can say "but unhappy customers are bad for us", but there are actually very few niches, where this signal is powerful enough to align incentives, because information and power asymmetry limit the customers understanding of product quality and their leverage to correct harmful market dynamics.
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.
You know, I would love a feature that lets me mark push notifications as spam, and optionally send them to Apple. The last part is important for a variety of reasons, one of which is that notifications can be end to end encrypted.
Spam filter push notifications.
Ideally enough spam reports for Uber Eat’s constant marketing abuse and they lose APNs access for the Bundle ID associated with the spam reports. For example.
You’re right of course, but Apple won’t do it - they’re happily running a two-tier system where Uber, eBay, Doordash can force spam notifications on you with impunity. All my settings for marketing are off - eBay still sends me notifications about coupons (and additionally there’s no way to actually contact them to complain, of course). Doordash won’t let me get delivery notifications without marketing notifications.
Apple could fully enforce their policies and fix this in a heartbeat, but they won’t.
Fine, but that’s was clearly not enough to stop the spam, nor it was enough to satisfy everyone.
There are some apps I can’t afford to mute or uninstall, such as phone, transportation, communication and work. I wish I could, but I currently can’t, I’m not privileged enough.
“Punishment by Apple” in this instance is somehow the only response anyone had to misbehaving companies.
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.
If you’re in gmail there’s literally already an interface to easily unsubscribe from stuff, it’s under “Manage subscriptions”. Yahoo similarly have a “subscriptions hub”
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.
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.
Adding a filter is still extra work for me. Saying “no” stops the need for the rule and is less work than giving the info in the first place.
My phone is setup similarly. I did it manually back in the day, then sent some feedback to Apple, which they added in the next update about a year later. I’ve submitted a lot of feature requests, this was the only one they actually did, which is a great one. It made things much easier. Though they seemed to have changed the settings of how this works with the call screening feature. I used to have a shortcut to toggle this off and on, when I was expecting a call from an unknown number. I need to revisit my setup here, as the shortcut doesn’t actually do anything anymore.
Doing this to email is an interesting idea. If sitting in one ecosystem, maybe it would work. I’m fractured, so it’s a non-starter. Even beyond that, I think it would be an issue as there are real emails I do want to get which I’d never add to my address book, as I’d never send an email to the address. I think I’d want a whitelist for these addresses, that imported the emails from my address book as a base.
At work I had a rule like this for many year. Anything internal would pass, plus a few external domains I named. Everything else would go to a spam folder for vendor emails. Keeping up on this was hard. I ended up throwing in the towel a couple years ago after running the rule for 5-10 years. This blog post is what made me move away from this rule[0].
I'm sorry to burst your bubble but I don't think your feature request had anything to do with when apple implemented call allow listing. It's been a thing forever and they were surly aware of it since the iPhone first came out
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
On iOS it wouldn’t even be that hard. There’s already a toggle to disable use of cellular connectivity. Add a separate one for non-cellular (iPadOS can connect via Ethernet), and/or a “disallow all” toggle.
We are partly there in spirit with App Transparency keeping track of the IPs and hostnames apps connect to.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Yeah, that's true about the allow, and for sure marketing and product teams are deploying misleading consent priming which doesn't fully explain to the user what they're actually allowing in the first place, or setting baselines that are too permissive vs what the user is expecting.
> 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
I don't disagree necessarily, but I see it as them putting themselves in a position to act as a toll collector, which has already happened with email and web search and is only getting worse with the introduction of LLM's into both of those things.
It's a bummer this article ended up doing much better than my email one, as I think that might better position the problem in a lot of user's minds and highlight just how much surveillance is sitting on top of those free inboxes.
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 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
“ 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.
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'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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now a few apps have started sending notifications through WhatsApp because they have my phone number. e.g. Amazon
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!
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.
It's integrated somehow with the phone app on iOS, whatsapp calls show alongside GSM calls.
You are a two factor app. I should never be in a situation where there is an unexpected login I need to verify.
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.
Isn't that kind of the point? If someone else is trying to login somewhere with your credentials, your two factor will ping up?
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.
Because to get that far they entered your password? Which you might like to change?
You did mention: "You are a two factor app."
If they've got past your first factor, you might want to know.
This has been going on since at least 2006.
Startups will "growth hack" by buying e-mail lists and feeding them into their password recovery tools.
A certain percentage of people will then follow the links and end up creating a new account on a service they had no interest in that now has their confirmed contact information, a new user, and a plausible reason to bombard them with marketing email.
The account was supposedly registered for an organization whose name was somewhat similar to mine, so I thought somebody fat-fingered their coworker's email (the initial email was an invitation to create an account and join the org), but it might have very well been the tactic you described.
I'd rather choose better software than let Google/Apple decide what software running on my device is allowed to do.
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.
Of course you could describe almost all of the internet that way.
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.
Imagine you're a shipping company and lock yourself into a parcel tracking protocol. You then decide to offer the innovative feature of parcel lockers, which need a code (or an action on your device) to open. How are you going to make the thousands of weird homebrew clients that people are using on their jailbroken Nintendo Switches or whatever to behave?
In other words, you need the user of the software to pay for it's development. Since that won't happen ...
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.
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).
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.
My phone has been on DoNoDisturb since 2010 or so. Here's the reality: I don't check for any of those things. Delivery drivers can ring the door bell. If I'm very hungry I'll keep the app open and check where they are. I literally do not care to be notified about any of the things that apps want to notify me off.
Anyone who cares to reach me knows to ring the phone twice in case of emergency to get through DnD. Anyone else? The best time to call is text me. Or schedule a time.
As for Claude, the point of clankers is that they work in the background. The robot can wait, their infinite patience is a feature.
Manually polling multiple items as you go around your day is stealing valuable mental bandwidth that could be used in better things.
I both agree and disagree with you. I disabled notifications for everything and found myself refreshing email too often. But if I have the notifications, I can get disturbed too often which also takes mental bandwidth.
For me I found the best tactic was to selectively enable notifications (whatsapp for just one person), and delete (not silence) everything else - I don't have email on my phone now - the temptation to check it is more than the need to have it. As for things like PagerDuty, I have it send an SMS and phone me instead.
Hundred percent agree. I wouldn't support having notifications for everything enabled.
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.
I have WhatsApp notifications enabled because it is the primary way people communicate where I live. If my elderly mother messages or calls me, it will most likely be through WhatsApp.
Both of those notifications contain genuinely important or time-sensitive information which may require action on my part.
That's the distinction between them. A person contacting me is fundamentally different from a brand attempting to engage me. Transaction alerts are fundamentally different from “your order is out for delivery”.
The criteria is not “did a thing happen”. It's whether the notification gives meaningful new information that is important or time-sensitive, and requires me to take action.
Most app notifications fail that test completely.
What if you receive notification about transaction that you didnt make? :)
Same with websites like Youtube who don't understand a plain "no" but offer a fake choice between "yes, harvest all my data" and "ask me again later". That isn't consent, it's coercion.
2. because most of the time, any other option is bloody inconvenient
Maybe she didn’t opt in, but she will never unsubscribe from anything.
Emails from every site she’s ever shopped at.
This too is frustrating. Spam is not allowed unless you have a "prior relationship".
But fuck me, that single toddler's bike I bought many years ago for my then toddler no longer qualifies as us having a relationship.
Also, websites are shady. If you put in a required email, they'll usually automatically check a little box for you that says "allow us to ruin your inbox?" How helpful of them.
And, I'm not even convinced that checkbox does anything.
The checkboxes seem to be a placebo. Sometimes there isn't one. Sometimes it doesn't do anything. Sometimes they say "updates on your order", which apparently also means future products you might want to buy a week after you receive your order. (Marketers' English seems like a foreign language to me).
People. Opt. In.
Stop conflating your preferences with other people’s.
Repeat until the emails stop.
I’m sorry but if you honestly think the number of users who receive marketing spam have expressed “informed consent” you’re fucking high. There is a multi-trillion dollar industry devoted to tricking people into opting into spam. Stop pretending these people are expressing any consent at all.
Android has notification channels, but I'm not sure how widely it's used: https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/compose/notificatio...
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.
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.
Works well.
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:
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.
I disagree. What the is the point of forcing everyone to use the Google Play Store (or whatever app store on iOS) if the store doesn't stop spammers?
People complain about Uber, but Lyft does the same shit. I got a promotional notification from Lyft and could not disable it without disabling the main notifications that tell me when drivers were arriving.
If app stores were useful instead of just rent-seeking, they would kick Lyft off until they stopped doing that.
Account > Settings > Accessibility > Communication Settings
It's the same reason Microsoft built functionality to let users in Europe have links open in their default browser instead of Edge but blocked that feature for the rest of the world.
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.
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).
Then I got a replacement iPhone and reinstalled Instagram.app, and it defaulted to "show you notifications for everything we think you might be interested in" again, and I was too lazy to spend all that time relearning how to disable those notifications. I disabled the notifications entirely and now I open the app once a week or so to check in.
I had to do the same thing with Facebook years ago. Now I open it once a month to see who from high school got married in the last month and click the little "heart" icon and scroll until I get bored (~2 minutes). Can't trust Zuck with notifications.
So do I. Login on the web incognito.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04835
I used the setting and am not getting Uber ads (only Uber ride notifications).
You turn off more and more categories and they'll still find a reason.
> 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'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".
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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”?
And when I had an office, I closed (not locked) the door to signify I was in a focus mode. I don't get your point.
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 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 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.
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 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 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
As for Whatsapp, maybe you're not in enough group chats that you still allow notifications...
Take your phones back. Life is immensely better these days.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 do want to know when a car is arriving.
I don't want messages asking if I'm hungry.
Are you hungry? Open your Uber Eats app now for 10% off.
/this message sent through PalantirFinder -- from marketing and coupons to ordnance, we deliver everything!
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.
There has always been "unpluggers" [0] amongst technologists, but the vibes are bad and getting worse. I feel like that is getting more common between "normal" people I know, but maybe outside of my country town bubble its not happening.
I was thinking we're only one or two big influencers away from a cascade, but then the ultra-influencers are never really going to commit because its their livelyhood and saying throw your phone away is self-limiting on the viral aspect.
I guess we're just stuck under the boot.
^0 https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus...
Never underestimate the ignorance of the average person…
I am talking about those people who consume content while ads blink around the content in a all four directions and they don‘t even actively notice.
But I digress.
You want to use any of those things, you’ll have to pay their toll booth, figuratively or literally.
Except for marketers! I don't think there's a less sympathetic category of technologists, save for maybe CSAM peddlers.
You're upset that you can't get "visibility" into whether the bullshit ad you tried to ram down my throat landed on target? You're worried that I'm a dormant user and my phone will silently delete the spam you sent to try to hook me back into engaging with whatever worthless product you're hawking?
World's tiniest violin, buddy. Boo fucking hoo. Your last paragraph says the "senders" (read: spammers) who make it through the next decade intact will be, to lightly paraphrase, the ones who send messages the recipients actually wanted. You say that like it's a bad thing!
The computer is in my life because it is a tool that does the things I want. It is not an open mic for marketing sleazebags to try to sell me shit. May every single one of your attempts to invade my life and hijack my attention be flushed swiftly down the toilet.
> Almost like there are aligned interests there rather than a purely adversarial relationship.
You might very well be the exception, but for something like 99% of marketing content that reaches me, our interests aren't aligned. First of all, they want to generate "needs" where there weren't any before and probably shouldn't be. A pizza ad produces the wish for unhealthy food. A fashion ad produces the wish for new clothes (even though I have enough) and probably even changes the societal dynamics of individual expression and personal style to be consumption oriented.
Second, even if I have a legitimate need for a solution, they still want me to buy their product, consume their media, give my attention to them. I, on the other hand, want to be informed by a neutral third party about the pros and cons of some product. Sure you can say "but unhappy customers are bad for us", but there are actually very few niches, where this signal is powerful enough to align incentives, because information and power asymmetry limit the customers understanding of product quality and their leverage to correct harmful market dynamics.
And it was awesome.
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.
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.
An intermediate seems to be trying to fix it.
Is it ideal? No. But it's the spammers who are to blame.
Spam filter push notifications.
Ideally enough spam reports for Uber Eat’s constant marketing abuse and they lose APNs access for the Bundle ID associated with the spam reports. For example.
Apple could fully enforce their policies and fix this in a heartbeat, but they won’t.
There are some apps I can’t afford to mute or uninstall, such as phone, transportation, communication and work. I wish I could, but I currently can’t, I’m not privileged enough.
“Punishment by Apple” in this instance is somehow the only response anyone had to misbehaving companies.
> 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.
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.
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.
("list-unsubscribe" OR "unsubscribe" OR "list-id")
https://unfuck.email
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.
My phone is setup similarly. I did it manually back in the day, then sent some feedback to Apple, which they added in the next update about a year later. I’ve submitted a lot of feature requests, this was the only one they actually did, which is a great one. It made things much easier. Though they seemed to have changed the settings of how this works with the call screening feature. I used to have a shortcut to toggle this off and on, when I was expecting a call from an unknown number. I need to revisit my setup here, as the shortcut doesn’t actually do anything anymore.
Doing this to email is an interesting idea. If sitting in one ecosystem, maybe it would work. I’m fractured, so it’s a non-starter. Even beyond that, I think it would be an issue as there are real emails I do want to get which I’d never add to my address book, as I’d never send an email to the address. I think I’d want a whitelist for these addresses, that imported the emails from my address book as a base.
At work I had a rule like this for many year. Anything internal would pass, plus a few external domains I named. Everything else would go to a spam folder for vendor emails. Keeping up on this was hard. I ended up throwing in the towel a couple years ago after running the rule for 5-10 years. This blog post is what made me move away from this rule[0].
[0] https://herman.bearblog.dev/digital-hygiene-emails/
Hence I doubt retailers will ever consider offering a fair price.
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.
Feels like an education issue rather than a tech issue.. thoughts?
It can be hard to set phone boundaries with work. There are certain people who get very upset if I don’t answer their phone call.
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.
"...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...
Fascinating how the author openly frames the situation as the sender and receiver’s interests being opposed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds fine with me?
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...
On iOS I assume you're sol, that notification system is unhinged to my eyes.
>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?
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.
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.
There's zero reason not to include it as a toggle.
We are partly there in spirit with App Transparency keeping track of the IPs and hostnames apps connect to.
Are you really installing that many apps that this is so hard?
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.
"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?!
> Your visibility into all of this is poor by design, and getting worse.
Great! This article is all good news, it seems.
Classic
From the author's blog: "I do Revenue Operation, helping Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams with data, process and technology."
How is bad summarisation good for a user, for example?
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.
With the exception of one trying to extract currency from the other, in exchange for something of dubious value—no.
"now here's a list of how to get around that!"
So good for me.
But there's some really scary stuff in here happening to other people that I'm not even aware of.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
I don't disagree necessarily, but I see it as them putting themselves in a position to act as a toll collector, which has already happened with email and web search and is only getting worse with the introduction of LLM's into both of those things.
It's a bummer this article ended up doing much better than my email one, as I think that might better position the problem in a lot of user's minds and highlight just how much surveillance is sitting on top of those free inboxes.
I still get notifications (SMS, email, calendar, etc) but nothing pushed
So … mission accomplished then? This is pretty much how I would like it to operate.
On iOS I have to find the right setting page and then all notifications are either on or off. Doesn’t make sense.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/108781#manage-alerts
1. Uninstall the app
2. If the app is non-optional for some reason, block all notifications.
A nondeterministic, energy hungry classifier is inferior to writing a policy to define channels.
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 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.
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...
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.
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)
Intervening with push notifs could be a good thing. Notifs are approaching the point of uselessness. I turn all off by default now.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48301060 and marked it off topic.