My rule is: if I get a single notification that I find useless, I'll immediately disable that notification channel (I'm on Android; I'm not sure if iOS has a concept of channel-specific settings) for that app. Even if the channel can include useful notifications, as the article discusses.<p>If the app doesn't bother to categorize its notifications into channels at all, I turn off its notifications entirely, and I won't turn it back on.<p>If something is important enough, I can always manually check on it. My attention is too valuable to me to waste it on useless notifications.<p>I do want more control over my notifications in general. I use Google Apps Script to automatically process/triage my email, and I want to do something similar with notifications. I can probably do so using Tasker, but I haven't gotten around to it.
I've noticed this in social networks as well. If you don't get enough transactional notifications for a while they start making up fake ones like Twitter's "in case you missed this Tweet", Facebook's "[someone] posted for the first time in a while", all the while lighting up the notifications badge. Leads to a "boy who cried wolf" scenario in which I stop trusting notifications entirely and just ignore them, possibly missing out on actual useful ones.<p>I really wish companies let us turn this kind of thing off, or better yet stopped trying to boost "engagement" numbers by violating your user's trust.
I have a pretty good idea on how to fix this (and many similar) problems: "hibernate app" option. Its a new app state where app icon icon has some mark (like being semi-grayed out) and all the background app services are disabled (tracking, promotional popups, periodic wakeups, etc...). The app is only un-hibernated if user explicitly clicks on it, it cannot do it by itself. The app can be hibernated by long-press menu on app icon or notification.<p>So the first time you get an ad notify, you click "hibernate" and you are good. And if it is time to make another order, app is woken up, so you cannot miss notifications by accident.<p>Sure, it is not as good as having separate "show ads" toggle, but it requires no cooperation from app whatsoever,
Every notification system eventually becomes email. What that means is that we probably need OS-level spam filters so that you can report things as spam. If the notification looks spammy based on the training, it simply won't show up. Marketers think they're reaching you, an army of software engineers remained employed to figure out how to refactor the API to send notifications with the V3 protocol or whatever unnecessary change the OS vendor made this week (driving up every other software engineer's salary; thank you!), but you don't have to be woken up by the latest not-actually-a-very-good-deal.<p>Whether or not the notification was delivered or blocked by the filter probably shouldn't be fed back to the application, to stave off the inevitable workarounds. But people will test stuff on their own devices and find workarounds. "Your order has arrived! Tap for details." But when you tap it's just an ad. On the other hand, it would be nice for things like Pagerduty to know that all of their notifications were blocked and that they should escalate to the next person on the rotation.<p>The "mark as spam" data should be fed back to the app stores, and if the app requested status notification privilege and not marketing notification privileges, their app is pulled until they fix it. (Cannot wait to read the whining about that. "I'm just trying to hustle like some blog post from 30 years ago said I should! <crying face emoji>")<p>In the meantime, I don't really ever turn on app notifications. They usually email me, and what's great about email is I have the Spam folder and the Promotions tab, so I never see most of their communications.
I wish iOS had some "allow notifications from this app for x minutes" option similar to "share location once".<p>Uber is a good example of an app I would like to see notifications from, when using their service, but disabled them completely.<p>Uber abuses this feature to show ad banners for scooters or food when I am not using their app and it's not even open (as in not present on the open applications list).
I was saying this yesterday, LinkedIn, as an example, sends me the most inane notifications as do many apps trying to steal my time. I pay LinkedIn 100 dollars a month, those notifications should serve me, not the other way around. I really don't care about some low substance content written by someone who I'm neither connected with nor follow.
I have a somewhat similar gripe about apps, which has some recent implications: there seems to be some school of thought for engagement, which suggests that something that's not used at least weekly is useless. For this reason Google started automatically removing permissions from apps I didn't use for some time and it's also suggested I could delete them "to save space" which is frankly quite stupid -- I have quite a lot of apps which I only intend to use when needed, but I need them installed and ready. A perfect example are emergency apps -- I do not intend for my car to break down every couple of weeks, but when it does, I need the emergency services app. I don't want to open the desaster warning app consciously, but I want it to warn me when something happens, be it today or in three years. Don't judge the app by its daily usage time please.
In email land, the terms for helpful vs promotional are "transactional email" for the helpful stuff (e.g., <a href="https://mailchimp.com/help/about-transactional-email/" rel="nofollow">https://mailchimp.com/help/about-transactional-email/</a>) and "marketing email" for the promotional ones.<p>There are channels to report abuse if it's bad, not to mention just leaving reviews and mentioning why.
Apple has lost the moral high ground because they decided to spam everyone with notifications for revenue-generating services like Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple TV+ etc in order to increase their services revenue.<p>This also means they can't effectively enforce App Store guideline 4.5.4, which says:
... Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI...
As someone who travels a bit I’ve got quite some food delivery and ride share apps on my phone. The marketing notifications are driving me crazy, I regularly miss relevant notifications because Grab, Uber, Uber Eats, Glovo, Bolt, and Cabify are all sending me almost daily notifications with some sort of cringe content trying to nudge me to take a cab/order food. Especially Uber Eats and Glovo are bad.
If an app gives me spammy promotional notifications, it either A) gets uninstalled (if I don't particularly care about the app), B) gets a 1-star review with a clear comment about the notifications, or C) all of the above.<p>The app I use to pay for parking spots suddenly gave me a notification once, apparently to try and get me to park my car more often or something. I gave it a one-star review, never saw one of those notifications again :-)
(Which reminds me, I should revise that review.)
Heh. I was woken up by an Uber greenwashing marketing notification. All notifications off (and in any case if I am waiting for a Uber I have the app on waiting for the countdown and I don't need the notifications anyway). If there were a viable competitor to them where I live, I would have deleted the app altogether and given them a 1-star rating.<p>Apple's policies ban the use of push notifications for marketing purposes, but they don't enforce it nor do they provide a way for customers to report violation, so that policy is completely useless.
My general mindset is that I survived just fine before apps and notifications were a thing. If they provide truly useful information, I'll use them. If they become spammy or start trying to prod me to drive more engagement I'll disable, or delete, whatever is enabling that. If that means I delete the app, and possibly stop using the service altogether, so be it, I'm doing just fine.
I highly recommend installing Buzzkill for those on Android.<p>In addition to built-in per-channel settings, Buzzkill allows you to create rules to auto-dismiss or do certain actions depending on the title or description of the notification, using basic matching or regex.<p>It also gives you a nicer view of notification history, with more days and scrubbing across time if you ever want to revisit past notifications.<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston.buzzkill&hl=en&gl=US" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston....</a>
I always relish in uninstalling apps when this happens but I hope they have stats somewhere that show: "oh, we sent this annoying marketing notification and an uninstall happens", and I hope some analyst is finding that pattern in their data and telling people about it. But I have to assume the answer is, 'probably not', given that nothing seems to change.
This is literally what drove me away from Facebook, completely. Their constant “redesigning” of notification and privacy settings was a veiled effort to force whatever notifications in front of me. There are certain notifications I want from you Facebook, but you made a grave miscalculation when you thought I’d put up with everything else you threw at me. So here I am, a Facebook user since 2007(?) who pretty much walked away in 2019 and has barely been back.
Canadians can report this <a href="https://fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/eng/home" rel="nofollow">https://fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/eng/home</a><p>CASL isn’t just for emails, it’s for all forms of spam you didn’t opt into
> Better yet, it would be great to have some sort of “disable marketing notifications” inside the app.<p>Given the current state of app distribution I’d rather have this _outside_ the app. Add an OS level toggle to enable or disable marketing notifications (system wide or app specific), force apps to categorize their notifications, and provide a mechanism to report bad actors. This problem creates a bad experience for all users so seems like it’s worth platform-level intervention.
This is one of the many aspect of why it is important to have control on your computing device. Fight for it!<p>(And yes, if I can't find an open source app for a service, I won't use it. I'm fine and very happy in my life, I don't miss any specific thing, and yes, no useless notification indeed. Try it!)
I don't wanna be opted-in by default into any notification generated by any automated process.<p>only when a fellow human clicks (i.e. directly triggers) <i>one</i> action (intended to call my attention) should I be interrupted with a full notification by default.<p>all notifications generated in bulk, by an automated script/bot, or as a side-effect of a human action need to be explicitly activated by me before they can interrupt me.
It once again comes down to the fact that we are the product, not the customer. In this article, Devin Booker is the customer.<p>Also, after reading many comments with suggestions and hacks to work around this (which I also do, btw), I think we may be missing the point, our time is valuable, and if we've all just spent half a day figuring out how to get the proper applications from a single app on our phone, we've already paid the price - and it's not right.
There’s an iOS feature called time-sensitive notifications (which eg Uber uses). Unfortunately it’s a subset of notifications as a whole, so I can’t disable notifications and allow only time-sensitive ones :-/
Lyft does the same thing. I need the normal notifications ("Your driver will arrive in 2 minutes") but every few weeks they send me a promotional notification ("Rides are 20% off on Labor Day!") randomly.
While it is a quite a bit more work to get working correctly, I imagine you could cobble something together with iOs' focus modes [0] and shortcuts [1] automation (where shortcuts can change the focus mode). Just put everything you want all the time in allowed apps, and then disable the focus mode when the required notifications are needed.<p>You can also automate "when app X is opened, select focus mode" [2], so maybe the workflow would be:<p>When app with annoying notifications is opened (i.e. is needed), disable focus mode.
Then reenable focus mode 1 hour later through automation.<p>Still more annoying than having some kind of built in thing, but shortcuts does really enable fixing a lot of annoying things (especially in iOS[3]).<p>[0] <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212608" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212608</a><p>[1] <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-nz/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/en-nz/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.howtogeek.com/676204/how-to-automatically-launch-shortcuts-when-you-open-an-app-on-iphone-or-ipad/" rel="nofollow">https://www.howtogeek.com/676204/how-to-automatically-launch...</a><p>[3] why doesn't the quick action for bluetooth turn off bluetooth? so annoying. So I wrote an shortcuts button, that I click instead.
I only care about NO notifications. Disabling all notifications is the first step to more saner approaches to technology. I turned my digital life into a pull medium where I check SMS messages etc when I want to, and not having real-time notifications of every little event gives me more peace. It’s a form of digital veganism that I employ. Turn your digital life into pull mediums instead of push.
Do apps report back how often notifications are turned off?<p>I'm wondering if the people who are spamming notification have any insight into the damage they're causing -- and if they did, if that would incentive better behavior.
I wish there was a fine grain control for <i>Teams</i> notifications.<p>The amount of messages I get that do not need my immediate attention and/or could have been an email is astounding.<p>I turned off notifications for Teams as a result and hope that people will call me if it is really urgent.
Whatever rule requires Hulu to display a little ad logo (I assume it’s a rule) when they’re on ad break, even the standard cable channel feeds, is great. It should apply to everything, including push notifications.
Isn’t the justification of Apple that they have a monopoly on the App Store so they can protect users from notification abuse? In reality this is not enforced at all and even Apple themselves will send you ads.
This is doubly bad when the notification is on my watch. Looking at you, Uber.<p>There's a fair number of apps I'd happily enable useful notifications on, but don't because they send marketing crap.
This is interesting to me. I'm extremely frustrated by meal delivery apps, where I need the notifications on to know when my food is here, but <i>hate</i> getting promotional ads at random<p>We're working on tools to help developers send notifications more easily at <a href="https://www.courier.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.courier.com/</a>, and working on tools like automations to hopefully make notifications a bit smarter and less spammy.
This is a fairly straight forward expectation. That app developers have to be explicitly made aware of this through a public blog post is kind of shameful. It clearly shows to what extent they are ready to abuse user attention and how little they care about end user.<p>This is just another example in a looong list of things which point to a steady erosion of end user control on things and how they are being reduced to agents optimizing metrics that matter for my app/product.
I faced this issue while writing my application for online spaces...<p>I noticed that I had written a feature called server notification, and was about to start using it to notify users of things which the server wanted them to know, but which they had not asked for.<p>I decided to rename the feature internally to "server response notification", which implies that all of the notifications are in response to a user query. This helped me focus on what the feature should be used for.
On Android, they <i>tried</i> to improve this by adding notification channels[1] (aka categories). Channels are mandatory, and users can turn each channel on/off in system settings.<p>The problem is few apps assign meaningful or useful channels. Instead:<p>(1) Some apps use the dark UI pattern of putting important notifications and junk/spam notifications together in one channel. They use the ones you do want as leverage to make you see the ones you don't want.<p>(2) With some apps, they just don't make an effort. For example, the JustWatch app has two channels: "Default" and "Miscellaneous". The KAYAK app has two channels; one is called "Offers & promotions", and the other is also called "Offers & promotions".<p>(3) Defining useful, meaningful channels is actually a bit of a UI challenge. Some apps try but don't divide things up in a useful way. The Meetup app has a ton of channels, including 12 at the top level and 3 for each Meetup group that you're a member of. They made an effort, and it helps some, but it's a bit overwhelming.<p>---<p>[1] <a href="https://developer.android.com/training/notify-user/channels" rel="nofollow">https://developer.android.com/training/notify-user/channels</a>
Are there any Android utility apps that will route all notifications through a single proxy where I can apply my own app/category/keyword filters, and [ideally] inbox/archive of notifications?<p>People criticize email, but I still find it the most user-friendly notification/messaging system. I wish for the type of control that I have in email over any other messaging/notification system (app alerts, Instagram messages, Slack notifications, etc.)
I ban an app from ever sending me any notification the moment it sends me an unwelcome one. But it sounds like this is not an option for some apps other people use.
It seems like every new communication channel follows the same basic pattern (phone, email, SMS, push notifications, ...). It starts with friend-to-friend communication, but quickly commercial entities realize there's an opportunity to connect with customers. They usually start with something small and helpful, but before long you're overrun with spam.<p>I'm counting the days until my flashlight app tells me I've won a free cruise.
There’s asshole companies and cool companies. Asshole companies send marketing notifications when people sign up for useful notifications. Companies on the edge default to on but at least let you turn off notifications.<p>Asshole companies can still be useful. I use UberEats but have their notifications turned off.<p>I’ll also add that I’m amazed that after using an iPhone for 15 years, I’ve never gotten a spam push from Apple. And their temptation must be great.
While Apple should be able to enforce this at an App Store level, it seems to me there’s a pretty simple heuristic that could be applied as a per-app notification setting:<p><i>“Mute notifications if I haven’t used this app in more than 24 hours”</i><p>That ought to catch the majority of notification abuse, and to tighten it even further, the inactivity periods could be configurable (24, 8, 2 hours, etc).
I think a couple others have said this already, but I know when I was sending out push notifications at my previous job, you would add a "channel" for the notification for this exact reason. Then users could block that specific channel without blocking the really useful ones (at least on Android)
This is when you email the company's head of marketing and/or security expressing naive concern about hacking/phishing. "I received an email that looked like it's from your company, but I know it's not real because I didn't sign up for any of your lists."
"Notification Remover" Android app allows to automatically dismiss some notifications but not others, based on user-defined filters. I use it and it works really well.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31636602" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31636602</a><p>From app description:<p>"Notifications will be cleaned automatically based on your input. Select the package name of an app and enter the message text (regular expression) of the annoying notification and you'll never see it again."<p>It however lacks ability to export / import filters so they need to be created manually.<p>Also the app is not longer updated. I hope at some point somebody will create open-source clone of it with more features.
Apps should allow for low level notification management. This allows the personalisation for notifications. Eg <a href="https://imgur.com/a/RSNu0Km" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/RSNu0Km</a>
Any way to subscribe to the notifications into Python or similar?
So I can run my own custom filters before I decide what and when the notification should be delivered. Could also use the notifications to trigger automations.
Kaufda is guilty of this. When i complained a about their promotional push messages, they pretended not to know what i was talking about.
I uninstalled the app which had been quite useful until that time.
My Bluetooth Blood-pressure cuff does this.
Useful notification:
Reminding me to measure my blood pressure twice per day, giving me a notification that I can tap to begin a measurement.<p>Not useful notifications:
Telling me that I have a "new insight available", which when tapped takes me to a prompt to "upgrade to a new premium feature.<p>I guess if you need to upsell me on a service after I've spent >$200 for your device I can use a different reminders app and be slightly inconvenienced twice a day.
I have turned off all notifications, no sound on my phone either. If I happen to look at the phone while someone is calling, good - otherwise I'll call them back or write them.
Technically Apple says if you want to send promotional notifications you have to ask for that permission explicitly and offer the user a way to turn just those notification types on/off. Maybe complain FWIW <a href="https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ios/system-capabilities/notifications" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...</a>
This is out of reach for most people, but what I would love is to be able to define a regex per app that will let me filter notifications. Give control back to the users.
I suspect some apps go too far in the other direction on purpose, having a large list of promotional notification types amidst useful ones so that people miss opting out of some or are too overwhelmed by the list that they decide not to bother, and whenever they add a "new" type of promotional notification, it's on by default until the user goes and disables it too.
I made the mistake of buying Eufy camera and the app is basically an sales channel spamming you with ads on every occasion. If you contact support and complain about it they will disable popus for you but the app is still full of spam and animated icons inviting you to buy something.
They clearly have zero respect for customers.
Everyone is focused on phones, but I've experienced this in Windows. There is a Korean office suite (Hancom Office) which updates 3-5 times per day, ringing the notification bell in Win10 each time regardless of current user focus. (User is in full screen movie? Ring the bell. Skype call? Ring the bell ...)
First thing I do with all apps is disable all notifications for that app. The only exception is whatever app my workplace uses (Teams). For that I simply turn the ringer to silent so they can't vibrate the shit out of me. For those they just need to wait for me to look at my phone.
I think there's a possible solution. Something like "Hide all notifications 5 hours after you last used the app". 5 hours could be enough time to do anything that the app needs to notify you for, then the marketing notifications come out of the blue 2 weeks later.
Yes. LinkedIn and Facebook being the worst. Even if there is nothing relevant they’ll just make something BS up just to remind you that they still exist.<p>Yes LinkedIn I know I’ve got 11 notifications waiting but I also know they’ll all be more noise…and I know this without needing to check
This post really lost me at: "and I’m sure they’re getting that many more engagements because of it"
clearly what spam notifications do is make me question having installed the app in the first place. For me this has led to many uninstalls.
It's not perfect but if they're using something like Braze you can block it by using a dns ad block like nextdns. Then you should only get notifications triggered by app logic and not by 3rd party marketing CMS whatever solutions.
I’ve started treating my phone like a firewall using do not disturb. Whitelist (aka favorite) the phone numbers I care about.<p>I will temporarily take off do not disturb when using Uber/Lyft. I don’t really have a need to be notified by any other app.
It's cool cuz on my Pixel 5 most of my notifications that I want I don't get in a timely fashion and the ones I don't want are just disabled anyway. I just want notifications to work at all.
The only way to really deter this stuff is to make it cost the sender something <i>per spam</i>. Bonus points if the user can feed back into the system to discourage truly unpopular notifications.
One solution here is using an app like Daywise, that batches and delivers your notifications. Some are useful but doesn't need in the moment attention. Has massively reduced my screen time.
that's one of the reason i got rid of my samsung phone: it used to send random nonsense notifications, MULTIPLE TIMES A DAY.<p>it would keep asking me to let samsung use my phone's cpu for whatever stuff they're doing, send multiple weather notification during the day (i didn't ever ask for them and now it's my job to go hunt for the appropriate setting to change to disable them? go f@@k yourself, you just lost a customer) and many more that i'm now thankfully forgetting.
It’s a shame there isn’t some kind of system wide filter for notifications using regular expressions or something. Probably a job for an Android ROM creator.
Android apps can classify notifications into different categories that you can individually toggle. I haven't personally noticed a lot of abuse of this.
I don't know when (or even <i>if</i>) it changed, but, using notifications for ads/promotion on iOS used to be a dev terms violation.<p>I really miss that era.