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Discussion (300 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
You are a two factor app. 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?
I'd rather choose better software than let Google/Apple decide what software running on my device is allowed to do.
Of course you could describe almost all of the internet that way.
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.
Align better for now. It will get enshittified.
I try very hard to avoid installing apps specific to a particular business or organisation. So far I have only had to install a government app and some from banks. Even those are avoidable (but it would be very inconvenient to do so).
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.
Which makes me wonder why you have notifications for your bank and Whatsapp enabled.
If I have an account, I know what transactions are coming out of it. I was the person who owned the account.
If I have someone's number, I know if I want to see messages from them. I was the person who gave them my number.
Seems really sill that you have notifications enabled for those apps. If you care about missing something, you'd just check them anyway.
Android has notification channels, but I'm not sure how widely it's used: https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/compose/notificatio...
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.
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.
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:
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.
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).
(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 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.
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.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2740908.2741694
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.
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”?
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.
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.
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.
As for Whatsapp, maybe you're not in enough group chats that you still allow notifications...
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
Take your phones back. Life is immensely better these days.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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...
But I digress.
You want to use any of those things, you’ll have to pay their toll booth, figuratively or literally.
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.
> 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.
("list-unsubscribe" OR "unsubscribe" OR "list-id")
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.
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].
[0] https://herman.bearblog.dev/digital-hygiene-emails/
Hence I doubt retailers will ever consider offering a fair price.
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.
Feels like an education issue rather than a tech issue.. thoughts?
It can be hard to set phone boundaries with work. There are certain people who get very upset if I don’t answer their phone call.
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.
"...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...
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.
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?
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...
On iOS I assume you're sol, that notification system is unhinged to my eyes.
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.
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.
Are you really installing that many apps that this is so hard?
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.
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.
On iOS I have to find the right setting page and then all notifications are either on or off. Doesn’t make sense.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/108781#manage-alerts
1. Uninstall the app
2. If the app is non-optional for some reason, block all notifications.
Classic
"now here's a list of how to get around that!"
So good for me.
But there's some really scary stuff in here happening to other people that I'm not even aware of.
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?
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.
With the exception of one trying to extract currency from the other, in exchange for something of dubious value—no.
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.
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.
> 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
I don't disagree necessarily, but I see it as them putting themselves in a position to act as a toll collector, which has already happened with email and web search and is only getting worse with the introduction of LLM's into both of those things.
It's a bummer this article ended up doing much better than my email one, as I think that might better position the problem in a lot of user's minds and highlight just how much surveillance is sitting on top of those free inboxes.
I still get notifications (SMS, email, calendar, etc) but nothing pushed
So … mission accomplished then? This is pretty much how I would like it to operate.
A nondeterministic, energy hungry classifier is inferior to writing a policy to define channels.
Channels are a great first level, and iOS absolutely needs to implement an Android-tier version of this.
But channels continue to be abused, even on Android. When all deterministic controls fail...
Secondly, channels are set by the developer (or platform). In an ideal world, I want to define whatever channels I care about, and turn them on/off at will.
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...
I also saw elderly people receiving such notifications and not knowing why. Then I realised that this system is designed to abuse the elderly, so I am now totally against it.
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.
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)
Intervening with push notifs could be a good thing. Notifs are approaching the point of uselessness. I turn all off by default now.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48301060 and marked it off topic.