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.
I feel like this article reads like the author is upset that Apple + Google prevent / control certain types of notifications (read: spam)
> Cross-sell, upsell, education and discovery can work on push
Push notifications should only be for transactional notifications. I don't want another inbox for junk.
Agreed. I have a doc appointment app, where I like the notifications to be on for reminders etc.
Lately they started sending marketing messages through that channel. Now I’m sure it’s possible to turn off the marketing messages. But I bet most people don’t know and won’t change that. It’s super annoying.
Same for things like Uber.
I do want to know when a car is arriving.
I don't want messages asking if I'm hungry.
Hi whstl,
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!
> 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 guess we're just stuck under the boot.
^0 https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus...
I absolutely hate medical marketing. I recently decided to switch dermatology practices over a combination of bad data management, unwelcome marketing for cosmetic dermatology products, and unsolicited SMSs. I never consented to receive marketing or texts (or to lose my data in a data breach, or to be billed for the in person services by practices other than the one from which I received services and ignored unopened as spam because I didn’t recognize the sender, etc…)
But I digress.
And soon, those appointment reminders might quietly be dismissed by your phone without you being any the wiser.
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Not upset, but increasingly concerned that all channels are being intermediated by big tech.
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.
I've definitely had notifications I consider spam direct from Google before. Apple/Google are not trustworthy.
Depends. Blackberry 10 hub was strongly designed as a shared inbox instead of a loose system of notification like ios or android.
And it was awesome.
Yeah these channels used to be respected in that way.
And then app developers discovered that hooks like "look what you missed" work on users and so now we all have to get them in the same category.
>discovery
I can’t think of a single app I want a “Discover” tab on anymore. The moment you include one is the moment there is someone trying to game it. I definitely don’t want push notifications trying to show me something new. I’m hardly lacking in distractions
(Yes I am sure somebody can give me an example of a good use of Discover but you get my point)
> (read: spam)
is it unironically incomprehensible to you that the owner of the device should in the one who gets to decide what is and isn't spam? it's not email where you can get bombarded with shit from any random server - you can mute or uninstall an app.
It should but apps don't let us decide.
An intermediate seems to be trying to fix it.
Is it ideal? No. But it's the spammers who are to blame.
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.
like I said, you decide by muting or removing the offending app.
That's not entirely fair to the author as the article also states that the consumer being in control is a must:
> Every step subtracts a degree of sender control. Some of it passes to the user, and that is a good thing: a person deciding what is allowed to interrupt them is the channel working as it should. The rest passes to the platform, and that is the part that should concern a sender, because the platform's judgment is opaque, unappealable, and increasingly made by a model rather than by a setting the user chose.
A platform has essentially two "clients" - the user and the developer. Without both, it wouldn't exist. And it is in the interest of both that the platform should have very limited arbitrary authority over them. Nobody can deny today that the platform owners today have too much power over their users and their developers, which makes it easy for them to commercially exploit them while undermining their rights. We need regulations and standards (for interoperability, which is one of the arguments being made) to counter this.
Been an app developer since 2009, worked on Android for 6 years at Google. Push notifications suck, users hate them.
Simultaneously, I cannot match the pull quote, an argument summary, to their argumentation. IIUC if the reword patent / Apple’s summarizing disappear there’s 0 reason to say it wasn’t control passing purely to the consumer.
So I’m left a bit empty as the high-minded purpose has little backing, and thus comes across as bloviating.
I’m constantly amazed how passive people are with things that steal their attention
My phone is in do not disturb mode 24/7. If your app notifies me about something pointless, it gets deleted and I start using your website instead
I have a mail rule that moves any email with the word “unsubscribe” out of the inbox into its own tagged area. Every few days, I go in and unsubscribe to everything that’s arrived.
Whenever a retail point of sale worker asks for my details or phone number or asks me to sign up to their club, I ask if there’s a discount. Because if there’s no discount - they get no details. It’s a simple exchange; offer to pay a fair price for my details and I’ll consider it. But so far my time and details are worth more than any retailer has offered to pay.
> passive
I get your point and see it as valid, yet to nitpick most people don't feel they have a choice.
Not answering the phone or replying to people's messages is a no-no to many, which sets them in an arms race against spammers and social apps trying to get them from all fronts. And they get frustrated by us living in no-disturb land 24/7.
I don't know it could be solved, but I feel for them.
For sure - some folks have to unwind expectations they’ve let themselves be under around responsiveness to messages.
Feels like an education issue rather than a tech issue.. thoughts?
That unsubscribe rule is genius. (Obvious in hindsight, as the best things are.) Thanks for that.
if you're in Gmail this filter works really well for me:
("list-unsubscribe" OR "unsubscribe" OR "list-id")
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].
Yes - and a fair price would incorporate that.
Hence I doubt retailers will ever consider offering a fair price.
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> Over fifteen years the channel has been rebuilt around one assumption: the receiver's attention is a scarce resource the platform is obliged to defend. … As a sender you are on the wrong side of that assumption, whichever way the control moved.
Fascinating how the author openly frames the situation as the sender and receiver’s interests being opposed.
They are not necessarily opposed, just in tension.
A zealous guard of your attention will occasionally block something you would like to have seen.
That being said, yes most notifications are garbage and should be blocked.
A fairly uncharitable read, I’d argue it states that the platform is acting on the platform’s interest, not the user’s.
Speaking from the standpoint of a user: I consider my attention a scarce resource that needs defending.
To the extent a platform has the same assumption, its interests are aligned with mine.
To the extent a sender does not have this assumption, I want the platform to defend my attention on my behalf.
> 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.
While I have slight worries about what it means for users if Apple and Google notification services go down/censoring, I do appreciate the features that they provide to me as an end user.
So many apps use annoying and questionable marketing notifications that I'd say I have about 70% of app notifications disabled globally (because the app itself does not allow disabling notifications / has no granular control).
However, it seems that SOME self hosted services can directly notify you without APNS / FCM. As an example, see https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notif...
Am I understanding correctly that iOS notifications have to go over apns unless on the same local network as the HA server? I do appreciate that android makes this possible for ha and signal (and others) in all cases, it should be up to the user to choose centralizing the connection vs. slightly worse battery life.
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.
> None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified.
Sounds fine with me?
I wish apple/google would implement better notification control - like the ability to turn off all marketing notifications, and a much better digest format
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.
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.
I just turn off all notifications for any app that sends me marketing notifications.
You are less charitable than me. Maybe I'll adopt your approach. I first give an app the benefit of the doubt and go into the apps notification preferences and see if I can fine-tune their notifications. If not, off for all at the OS-level. If yes, I tweak it, but if I get surprised by one later, off for all at the OS-level or uninstall. It's especially annoying because I don't have notifications shown on my home screen and need to unlock with a pin so if I go through the trouble of unlocking my phone to spam and I extra annoyed with the app.
That would be nice. I wouldn’t be surprised, as on-phone models get more capable, if we don’t see them start to build an “inbox” like we see with email where you can then start seeing much more heavy processing happening.
I think that's what the Notification Organizer on Android (maybe Pixel exclusive, not sure) does. It's sorting notifications into broad categories using AI and groups them in the notification shade.
Makes sense, Google definitely have a lot more experience in that space with gmail than Apple do.
Too bad about the walled garden or you'd have this tweak already installed years ago.
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.
I feel like the CAN-SPAM Act should apply to push notifications as well. I don’t know of any case that has tested this.
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.
> 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.
Apart from this, what is most needed in both platforms is an application firewall - not every app needs to be allowed to connect to the internet.
I can't believe this still isn't a thing outside of GrapheneOS. Being able to revoke network permissions is a fundamental security and privacy tool that's willfully left out of both Android and iOS.
There's zero reason not to include it as a toggle.
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.
Android is better because they allow you to change individual notifications right from the notifications themselves + granularly do it there also.
On iOS I have to find the right setting page and then all notifications are either on or off. Doesn’t make sense.
You can long press on the notification (or swipe left?) and pick "Turn Off..." among other options
turn off is the only option basically, try an android phone bro
This only works if the app properly tags notification categories, no?
It also shows what category the notification was tagged with. An app that improperly tags notification categories gets one of two results from me:
1. Uninstall the app
2. If the app is non-optional for some reason, block all notifications.
Marketing and advertising people ruin everything they touch.
Don’t forget the engineers and product folks who build these systems.
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
Am I supposed to feel sorry for developers? How did this make it to page one?
Seeing how they think about these things can be interesting.
> Google followed in 2010 with Cloud to Device Messaging, then Google Cloud Messaging in 2012, then Firebase Cloud Messaging in 2016
Classic
I’m curious if anything meaningful changed along with these name changes or it’s mostly issues of branding/implementation.
Vast majority of software should not be able to send a push notification. Send an email if you need to alert me.
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.
I dont uninstall apps that annoy me with notifications, but I do disable them. Most of my notifications these days are news or texts. So be it
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.
let me pour one out for all my homies in the marketing department...
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.
Push notifications are for the user, not the marketer.
From the author's blog: "I do Revenue Operation, helping Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams with data, process and technology."
You think there might be some sort of interaction between both facets there?
How is bad summarisation good for a user, for example?
Probably depends on the user. Along with push notifications for almost every app on every one of my devices, I disable the summarization.
For me the notification is the point, and the point of notifications to me is that they deserve my attention. Of the vanishingly few apps I install these days, almost nothing can say it deserves my attention. Even my bank doesn’t get those privileges.
I largely do the same, and keep my phone on dnd mode.
> You think there might be some sort of interaction between both facets there?
With the exception of one trying to extract currency from the other, in exchange for something of dubious value—no.
This article separately needs a summary at top.
Massively overlong article that really could have done with an editor. Although obviously editors cost money, and I'm reading it for free, so I can scarcely complain. Nevertheless, some concision would have been appreciated.
I'm very unclear to me what the thesis of the article actually is. Yes, push notifications run through the vendor's servers. Yes, Apple fucked up hard by modifying the text within them - and I contend that such modification is impossible to perform automatically without unreliability becoming the norm.
The author also appears to believe that "broadcast copy" - otherwise known as Spam by those who like to write slightly more honestly - is a legitimate use of push notifications. It is manifestly not, and any app that tries will at the very least be immediately silenced. I wish I could find the tweet that put this sentiment more entertainingly than I ever could.
If App developers continue to abuse the push notification system in this way, Apple and Google will be forced to take steps to solve what becomes an end-user's problem. Yet another tragedy of the commons.
It’s a through line from an article I posted last week about the similar situation in email, which has a lot more depth as inbox providers have substantially more published papers and patents showing their intermediation.
https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/what-google-yahoo-...
The next post will be highlighting the difference between the actual state of the art techniques being deployed by large tech co’s (LinkedIn and Pinterest, for example) vs what’s available via commercial marketing providers and how most marketers don’t even make the most of the tools they pay for.
> The author also appears to believe that "broadcast copy" - otherwise known as Spam by those who like to write slightly more honestly - is a legitimate use of push notifications. It is manifestly not, and any app that tries will at the very least be immediately silenced.
Cool man, but it might surprise you to find out that people knowingly opt into receiving this stuff and actually consent to it.
> Cool man, but it might surprise you to find out that people knowingly opt into receiving this stuff and actually consent to it.
Consent is more than pressing 'Allow' on a notification pop-up. It's often not even informed consent, as those pop-ups are usually a part of some onboarding flow where users are just trying to get to the value the app promises and pressing 'ok' to everything.
Even if people do indeed want notifications at the time of the ask, one doesn't really know if the message provider will wind up spamming, that's a matter of trust. And once opted-in, even if the users no longer want notifications, a lot just don't know how to turn them off. People are often incredibly accepting of sub-par experiences like this because of the friction and capability demanded of them to opt-out. My parents get tons of spam notifications that would pass your test of 'knowingly opt into receiving' but that when asked they say they do not want.
Finally there's myriad dark patterns that tons of apps use, like changing and resetting notification preferences among others.
I'd hazard a guess that observed opt-in rates far exceed users actual desires, so I wouldn't put much stock in them. I do agree that there are some people that like them tho!
Fwiw I've worked on both the delivery side (OneSignal) and developer side (Margins) so I've lived these choices and trade-offs. My believe is in terms of power dynamics, senders generally don't deserve their power to interrupt and should not possess that power. At best, they offer opportunities, which ideally are verified somehow prior to being presented to users. I'm happy that devices and ecosystems are moving in the direction of triaging and filtering sender content, as power needs to lie in the user's holistic, most pre-frontal cortex driven expression of their desired experience, and not just one moment's opt-in button they pressed.
Thank you for writing the article, good discussion points.
That's why my next phone will neither be Android or iPhone.
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.
This sure sounds like a marketer spending far too many words crying that they've lost surveillance on their customers. Boo hoo, don't care.
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.
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.
> 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)
I'm surprised that the article is this long with zero mention of Senator Wyden's concerns vis-a-vis Google and Apple's Push Notification system: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_...
I’m in the UK so I don’t catch all us news, good spot though
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We've banned this account.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48301060 and marked it off topic.
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.
There’s the other direction too. You only get a couple toggles, and something you actually need is behind both, so you can’t not get all notifications
Another sneaky behavior in Android is that categories that have yet to send a notification, which of course includes newly added auto-enabled channels, are collapsed under the 'show unused categories' button.
I recently had to setup Microsoft Authenticator. It refused to register a code unless I enabled notifications.
You are a two factor app. I should never be in a situation where there is an unexpected login I need to verify.
Okta has push as an option. Maybe msft has that too.
> I should never be in a situation where there is an unexpected login I need to verify.
Isn't that kind of the point? If someone else is trying to login somewhere with your credentials, your two factor will ping up?
> Why would I want that?
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.
> 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.
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.
“Bad about labeling” is pretending that might be an accident. Uber has repeatedly demonstrated they will do all the dark patterns.
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?).
Same here! If this phone made an unexpected sound I'd smash it with a brick.
And the inconvenience to constantly having to check your phone
For me, it's quite straightforward. If an app makes an unsolicited spammy push, it's notifications-off. No exceptions.
Snapchat has to be the all time worst offender to me about abusive level of notifications. Luckily, you can turn them off, but holy cow batman, that's a lot of notification options to deal with.
I flagged them as spam the other day.
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.
That's "growth hacking" for you
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.
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.
No one willingly says "yes" to advertisements, but people will say "yes" to important-updates(-and-advertisements).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Then why is it whenever I watch someone use their computer they always accept cookies?
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.
1. accepting cookies is not the same as opting-in to advertisement
2. because most of the time, any other option is bloody inconvenient
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.
They are choosing the lowest friction option.
Apple should add "promotional notifications" section to iOS, then ban everyone who don't put their marketing bs into that category
Yes! iOS 27 needs to categorize notifications using AI. Apps aren't supposed to advertise to you, but some don't allow for that distinction. I want notifications on for when my sandwich is arriving, but I don't want push notifications for a promotion. Some apps are good about this, others don't allow that granularity. I hate the all or nothing.
On the flipside, I have an app that sends notifications. We don't abuse it or use it for promotions, and APNS and Google's version works perfectly fine for us.
Apple isn't your friend though.
edit: downvote all you want. Fact remains that there is no way currently to block advertisement notifications and no disincentives for those who use them.
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.
Works well.
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..
Some banks also do this, and offer no way to segregate marketing from utilitarian push notifications. This is borderline abuse of trust IMO.
It's not borderline, it's absolutely crossed the line.
The user legitimately considers the application as hostile - hence sandboxing... Notification spam filtering is now the obvious need at the sandbox's edge, with the whole customizable arsenal we have come to expect for our inbound mail. Of course, Google will not cooperate with anything likely to reduce sacro-sanct engagement !
I definitely run all my emails through an LLM filter and wish I could do the same for push notifications!
Except that they did. Android has notification channels. Now, I suppose we could argue that Google could be more ham-fisted about forcing apps to use them, but that's murky.
In fact, Uber on Android does use these notification channels. I just have "All Promotions & Recommendation notifications" disabled, and then "Taking a ride" channel enabled.
periodically open the app every few minutes or so. once the driver is 5 minutes away -- go outside and wait.
it's a tradeoff. eliminating notification spam means behaving more synchronously when booking a taxi. i don't mind waiting outside for five minutes. especially if i'm not getting a random ping when i'm definitely not booking a taxi :shrugs:
I prefer temporarily toggling notifications on because I really don’t trust my internal metronome.
You could set a short timer on your phone. On an iphone, its two clicks away.
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.
While iOS doesn’t do this at the OS level I’ve never seen an app that didn’t have these options. I assumed it’s required by Apple.
Does Google actively police app's use of channels? Is there any mechanism to stop apps abusing "time critical" channels and sending unwanted marketing?
They technically allow you to, but make it really annoying to. Uber for example:
Account > Settings > Accessibility > Communication Settings
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.
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!
I don’t know about uber specifically but most of the apps I use have a separate toggle for things like marketing. Maybe it’s an EU thing?
The modern pattern in anywhere that allows it is to have dozens of ambiguously labeled toggles for nominally different notification channels, described only by a minimally brief and maximally ambiguous label. All begin as active until the user, in frustration, goes in and exhausts themselves disabling individual options without being sure which one is going to turn off the one single thing they actually want to be notified about.
Then next month, you create a new notification channel for your new promotional messages because too many people opted out of the old channels. You default that new channel to opt in, to make sure the user gets their chance to experience it and share in the delight you mean to share with them.
Presumably, you continue this until you have hundreds of such toggles and presumably some kind of dedicated Toggle Engineering Department that oversees them all. Nextdoor, Meta apps, LinkedIn, and countless others all appear to be competing for the most such toggles.
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.
That's how the design is supposed to work. But marketing realizes that no one voluntarily receives ads, so they mix em.
Yep exactly this. The app developers are the problem, but Apple and Google are not helping here.
This. So much this.
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.
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.
> Now I open it once a month
So do I. Login on the web incognito.
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).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04835
Presumably enforcing this would trigger an immediate legal response where Uber claims Apple is using their monopolistic control over the App Store.
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.
I would love if Apple enforced that rule, but they certainly don't
"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".
Apple and Google failed to make push notifications usable for the past decade. Most important notifications drown in a sea of absolutely irrelevant nonsense. It's a very primitive mechanism where many apps compete for very little screen real estate. Beyond "something happened!" there isn't a whole lot of information in most push notifications. They are mostly not very actionable and very vague about what actually happened. And "something happened!" just isn't very useful information to me. This has de-valued the whole notion of having notifications. Whenever something interesting actually does flash by, I often miss it or can't find it back.
The push notification UX is just beyond terrible and it just got worse over time as app developers tried abusing their super power of being able to interrupt the user at will and Apple and Google tried to get on top of that. The net result is something that's very mediocre for the handful of valid uses I have left for notifications. My list is similar to yours. Things like bank approvals, 2FA stuff, etc. are useful mainly as deeplinks into apps. But other than that, it's just not worth dropping whatever I'm doing and staring at my phone.
The most used apps on my Android phone (older Google pixel model) are Firefox and gmail and just a handful of other things. As a notification channel, my email inbox is actually far more useful than mobile push notifications. They are more actionable and informative. And I can individually unsubscribe them or filter them out and easily find them back. Most apps can do both and that makes the push notifications inferior and redundant.
> The most used apps on my Android phone (older Google pixel model) are Firefox and gmail and just a handful of other things. As a notification channel, my email inbox is actually far more useful than mobile push notifications. They are more actionable and informative. And I can individually unsubscribe them or filter them out and easily find them back.
There’s also substantially more filtering happening in the inbox which is mostly useful from a user perspective.
Yahoo literally wrote a paper more than a decade ago showing how they can model predictive causal chains for emails they expect you to receive, as an example.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2740908.2741694
Gee lets take a 5 inch screen phone and have every notification stack up in 1 inch worth of space. I really hate ios18. Too bad ios26 is even worse.
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.
Agreed.
And let's not forget focus modes... I have them that narrow greatly my default set of notifications, so I have a 3 tiers of notifications.
It's like the complaint I used to hear all the time: "Slack ruins work for me! OMG I can't work with constant interruptions!!" That is bewildering, because if that's how you feel, you haven't tuned your setup. Slack never interrupts me, yet I am response enough to slack messages. No one has ever complained about my response time. And I'm probably the most-messaged person on our Slack.
> if that's how you feel, you haven't tuned your setup
The withering cry of the software engineer "just tune your setup!" This is simply not a thing that people will do.
The defaults are so, so important. They are crucial. The vast majority of people rely on the defaults to be sane. The defaults should be sane.
The other problem with Slack is that it just straight up... doesn't do what you tell it to. I have a set of notification settings that work for me. Slack goes ahead and just does something else, and you simply can't fix it to do what it's told. (Or couldn't, anyway; I've been off Slack for a while.)
Absolutely agreed.
How much time must everyone be asked to waste to “tune” a working set of applications to something reasonably sane for human beings.
Sure, what is sane for one human might not be for the next, but it’s not as if trends cannot be discerned.
How ridiculous would it be to be told “if you don’t want people constantly barging into your office, lock the door”?
It wasn't much time at all. Honestly, the push back on this always baffles me.
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.
The idea that software like Slack could be setup as "one size fits all" is just ludicrous to me. We have options because different people require different settings.
For Slack, I find just changing the default notification sound to a simple and subtle ding works well.
When I’m focused, I don’t hear it because it’s too subtle. But when I’m not concentrating on anything, it’s more noticeable and I don’t mind the distraction.
This might not work for everyone (“YMMV” and all), but I’ve personally found it a very effective yet simple solution.
If you are very present on slack, ofcourse you dont feel that you are interruped.
I don't know what that means.
I have no audible sounds from notifications. They don't go to my phone, with few exceptions. I get no popups. Yet, I am responsive. It was trivial to set up.
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.
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.
> Phone, Messages
At this point, I'm pretty much in some form of DND at all times. I have a very small list of people that I allow the device to notify me at any time for calls/messages. Everyone else gets silenced and I'll get back to them when I choose. All other apps have notifications disabled and I'm constantly nagged about it when using those apps
I'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 my phone always in Do Not Disturb. That's it.
I have it turned off for my bank. For some reason Bank of America doesn't allow me to sign in with Face ID. I always need to get a text. Only reason I keep them is because I like a brick and mortar bank nearby.
Attention(/time) is our most valuable resource. Protect it ruthlessly.
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.
Phone, Calendar, Health - that's it for me
It's absolutely disgusting how most tech companies use notifications as an advertising or addiction building channel.
On the rare times I use an app like uber eats, I uninstall it directly after because the app sends multiple adverts a day through the notifications. I want a notification purely to tell me the driver is almost here. And nothing else.
I've noticed a priority inversion in recent iOS. Want to send me an SMS that matches a ban-list regex from a third party app, from a foreign phone number / obvious spam farm? No problem. The app to block you was auto-uninstalled, and the iOS notification filter will mark your message with the highest possible priority.
Want to continue a 300 message thread that I've been responding to? You're listed as my emergency contact, and called multiple times? Fuck right off. Straight to spam.
It's almost enough to get me to carry a second dumb phone or grapheneos device just so I can text and receive phone calls.
To your list, I would add a calendar and reminders app.