alt Hacker NewsNotification 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.
Replies
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
iOS asks you if you want to allow notifications when each new app is started. You can just say no there and you're done.
It would be better if they were totally opt-in of course (1), but that's not bloody likely to happen.
(1) As in off by default with no questions.
[dead]
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.