What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

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.

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.

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.

This part is factually incorrect:

"...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...

Whatever has replaced the Bulk Collection of Telephony Metadata Under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act informs the architecture of the Apple Push Notification, Firebase Cloud Messaging, etc. Apple owns the persistent connection to every iPhone, and only APNs can wake your app. So "self-hosting" here means running your own provider (the backend that decides what to send and hands it to APNs) instead of paying a third party like Firebase Cloud Messaging, OneSignal, or Pusher to do that for you. The last mile is never yours however. Any architecture that routes everyone's traffic through a small number of identity-aware intermediaries is, by construction, a bulk-metadata collection system waiting for a legal instrument.

[2] In December 2023 Senator Ron Wyden disclosed that the U.S. government and foreign governments had secretly compelled Google and Apple to turn over information from push notifications, including communications metadata and sometimes content. A detail that should bother any developer: app developers have no way to stop the practice if they want to send notifications on the platforms iPhones and Android rely on. Apple had been gagged from disclosing it until the program became public, after which it said it was updating its transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests. So the architectural hypothesis isn't speculative — it's the confirmed mechanism, differing from Section 215 mainly in domain (apps vs. calls) and legal vehicle (ordinary subpoenas, FISA orders, and NSLs rather than the specific business-records theory of §215)

[1] "Its just metadata". Thanks Obama! (joking of course, no single individual is responsible for these things, it is our collective political will and its the best we can do unfortunately)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUdm0QMDM0 [2] https://epic.org/sen-wyden-reveals-government-surveillance-o...

> 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.

> 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?

> 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.

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...

I wish apple/google would implement better notification control - like the ability to turn off all marketing notifications, and a much better digest format

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.

The entire architecture here is surprising to me.

>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?

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.

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.

There are apps that need 100% notification delivery reliability (in a sense that OS or delivery server itself will not be allowed to decide to just drop PN for policy reasons). I guess Google can only "solve" this (by simply not passing them through any "classification") for their own apps only?

For some android phone brands delivery reliability is like 40-50%. Some brands are better (reaching 80%, still bad) some very bad (usually the chinese brands, for some reason).

And the user has no say in this. They can't say: deliver every notification without classification. Or "allow this app to wakeup whenever it wants". Everything is babysat by the great overseer, even if you write the app yourself for yourself.

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.

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.

Marketing and advertising people ruin everything they touch.

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.

Am I supposed to feel sorry for developers? How did this make it to page one?

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

> that answers to the user rather than to you. You cannot out-shout it, and there is no appeal.

"now here's a list of how to get around that!"

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 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.

> Google followed in 2010 with Cloud to Device Messaging, then Google Cloud Messaging in 2012, then Firebase Cloud Messaging in 2016

Classic

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.

“ 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.

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."

> What the marketer can see

> Your visibility into all of this is poor by design, and getting worse.

Great! This article is all good news, it seems.

Vast majority of software should not be able to send a push notification. Send an email if you need to alert me.

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.

What I'm doing: leaving them all off

This article separately needs a summary at top.

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

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.

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 feel like the CAN-SPAM Act should apply to push notifications as well. I don’t know of any case that has tested this.

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."

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.

let me pour one out for all my homies in the marketing department...

> 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)

That's why my next phone will neither be Android or iPhone.

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_...

Also can the browsers finally acknowledge that allowing websites to request the ability to send desktop notifications was a terrible mistake?

How does this not mention alternatives? Here: UnifiedPush.org

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...

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.

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.