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.
You are a two factor app. I should never be in a situation where there is an unexpected login I need to verify.
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 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.
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.
Maybe she didn’t opt in, but she will never unsubscribe from anything.
Emails from every site she’s ever shopped at.
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
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.
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:
Account > Settings > Accessibility > Communication Settings
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).
I used the setting and am not getting Uber ads (only Uber ride notifications).
No, I don’t want ads, but I do want delivery updates from UPS/FedEx, breaking news for high impact stories, and I even want notifications for my favorite YouTube subscriptions.
Some people consider notifications interruptions but I really don’t. With my phone always on silent they’re all quite ignorable.
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.
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.
Take your phones back. Life is immensely better these days.
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
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!
But I digress.
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.
> 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.
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.
Hence I doubt retailers will ever consider offering a fair price.
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?
On iOS I have to find the right setting page and then all notifications are either on or off. Doesn’t make sense.
1. Uninstall the app
2. If the app is non-optional for some reason, block all notifications.
So … mission accomplished then? This is pretty much how I would like it to operate.
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.
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'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.
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.
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?
With the exception of one trying to extract currency from the other, in exchange for something of dubious value—no.
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'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.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48301060 and marked it off topic.