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.

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.

"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".

I totally agree. Right now the apps that can notify me are phone, text, email, what's app, and a few bank apps. You are 100% right about turning it off on everything else.

I also stopped doing store loyalty cards about 7 years ago and it's been fantastic. I actually get a lot less junk mail and spam/"legit" marketing emails. I don't have a gob of cards to sort through.

Corporations should not speak unless spoken to.

You're conflating "push notifications" with "being alerted about push notifications." I have many "important but not urgent" apps on my phone configured to just silently add their push notifications into iOS's notification center.

With an app configured to do notifications like this, no banner shows up at the time the app's notifications are delivered; and these notifications don't even show up visibly on the lock screen. You only see this type of notification if you choose to actively scroll down past the "timely" notifications that do get delivered onto your lock screen, to "catch up" on all your notifications.

Basically, these notifications are relegated to an "email inbox" that you can check or not check as you like. But unlike your email inbox, you can go "inbox zero" on your notification "inbox" whenever you like without worry, since notifications (unlike email) are inherently prohibited from being a critical path in an app workflow.

> Apps allowed to receive push notifications

> Phone, Messages, Whatsapp, Apple Health, [brand] bank.

Anyone else annoyed by the fact that you can set up do-no-disturb, with exceptions for certain phone numbers, but it doesn't work for apps like WhatsApp?

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.

Maybe it's for the best. The best practice is to have as few apps as possible. The moment an app is abusive with notifications, you know it's time to drop the app anyhow. A lot of people need that one final push to drop the app, so this could help.

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.

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.

My notification setup is more elaborate (for one, I do keep social media notifications on, but silent) but yeah I agree in general. It frightens me seeing some other people's notification shades where they have 20+ spam notifications from all kinds of things that I wouldn't even consider installing an app for, and they're somehow fine with it.

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.

Same: Phone, Messages, Calendar, Apple Health... nothing else can send me notifications.

On my work I also disabled all notifications except for the calendar. Even slack message our main tool for communication is not allowed to send notifications. It is almost a productivity hack :P

I agree with your points.

That said, my view is now (not novel, or unique) that I am not the customer in so many cases. Any app or platform with the slightest hint of an advertising end-game restructures my usage as the product.

The customer is instead the sender (or advertiser). So, I can't expect ideal app behavior and usage based on my intentions because I'm sold (as the product) rather than the other way around.

Maybe a cynical view, and there are exceptions, but don't think I'm far off.

The worst are apps that bundle genuinely urgent notifications with maketing brain-manipulation promotional crap.

Uber is a notorious example. I do genuinely want Uber notifications for when I use Uber. I do not care about whatever promotion it pushes at me.

Might as well use a dumb phone

I don't get what you guys are doing to be so bothered by notifications. I get them on my wirst and even then it isn't enough to take away mental bandwidth.

I classify them even further.

I have broadly the same list as you do, but stuff like WhatsApp, Messenger, and other "non primary" communications platforms have silent notifications in the sense that they're not allowed on the lock screen or Home Screen. They simply display a notification counter.

Stuff I care about that I can't do anything about "right now" are allowed on the lock screen but quietly. That includes messages from the kids schools. Most is not even that important, like field trips "next week", but once in a while there's an "important" message I need to deal with.

My bank likes to show offers, like a 10% discount in tires, but I have no car. Perhaps tree or four irrelevant messages per day.

I have MouseTimer that is an alarm that is nice to show to kids when they must wait or do something for 10 or 20 minutes. It should be able to ring and sometimes show notifications.

Health? Why, are you worried you'll miss the notification that you have a heart attack?

As for Whatsapp, maybe you're not in enough group chats that you still allow notifications...

I also allow emails, but I'm very agressive at filtering promotion/junk emails with skip inbox rules: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en

I went even further and my small set of the most important applications runs in the background - rest doesn't have that privilege. I've treated my spare Samsung phone same way.

I also don't use Siri either beyond setting timers and lights in home and every application is also excluded from being "suggested". Apple for 14 years didn't bother to add support for Polish so it basically remains useless.

> 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

Exactly. Same for me, except I don't have an iPhone and therefore no "Apple Health". I will take care of my own health, or not, on my own.

So I would say: only humans can send me notifications. That includes me in the case of 2FA. But no machine ever, for any reason.

I disable all group chat notifications too, only direct messages trigger notifications for me.

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.

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.

Fully agree, the apps are to blame for misusing notifications for marketing and ads, they are the ones doing this to themselves.

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.

There ought to be a flag to group all such notifications together and present them when the user wants to get to those notifications.

Attention(/time) is our most valuable resource. Protect it ruthlessly.

I have my phone always in Do Not Disturb. That's it.

if a app messages me it is uninstalled. we have too many installed apps anyways.

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.

Phone, Calendar, Health - that's it for me

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.

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.

Spot on.

To your list, I would add a calendar and reminders app.