Rampant Abuse of Push Notifications Is Ruining Them For All Developers

I wish spam prevention was a bigger part of Apple's culture.<p>I get spam robocalls on my iPhone and have no way to block them. I have recently started getting unblockable requests to Facetime with strangers on my Mac -- a service I didn't even know I was logged into. I have an Apple email address that is way behind Gmail on spam prevention. And as noted in the article, iOS notification spam is now an issue.<p>In contrast, Google has anti-spam as a core corporate competency. They know that where there is a profit motive, there will be spam. They truly think like hackers -- "if I were a bad actor, how would I abuse this feature?" Apple needs to pick this up.

The most hilarious one on my phone is a local transit app, which is sadly very useful so I'm keeping it, with an irate developer who uses push notifications to angrily respond to negative reviews in the App store. I get notifications like "Response to Gregory's negative review."<p>I actually read them sometimes because they are mildly amusing things like "Gregory's Review: 1/5 stars, didn't work. Developer comments: HOW ABOUT FILING A REAL BUG REPORT SO I CAN HELP YOU INSTEAD OF LEAVING A VAGUE BAD REVIEW."

That's a nice commons you've got there. It'd be a tragedy if something happened to it.<p>As has been extensively discussed, there are lots of drawbacks to the App Store model. But if they actually enforced limits on push notifications (or maybe even charged developers for them), it'll slow the tragedy of the commons a bit. I agree that individual users could do the same, but the marginal spammy app still has every incentive to be spammy.

The right solution is to have every single push notification have a "Silence this" link on it. That takes you to a screen naming the app and asking if you want to turn off its ability to do push notifications. This fact is tracked across users.<p>Add a warning from Apple that any app that is turned off by too many people will be deemed to be too spammy, and taken out of the app store.<p>This would completely solve the problem. In the absence of any such mechanism, all incentives point towards continued abuse of the feature.

I remember the day Draw Something started abusing push notifications: the <i>paid</i> version was sending me ads for other zynga games. What sucks is push notifications are almost essential for the functionality of the game: without them, you have to constantly check if it's your turn. I and many other people deleted the app as soon as the ads showed up. Talk about destroying a very valuable network effect for a quick profit-grab.<p>I'm now part of that group who reflexively rejects notification requests. I agree with this article that Apple should take action, but app makers should also realize the cost of abusing their customers.

I recently had to disable notifications for Words With Friends (it took two tries). The "nudges" were bad enough (I'll make my move when I have some free time, damn it) but the final straw was when they started holiday spam -- e.g., "Why not celebrate Halloween by playing a word like SPOOKY, WITCH, or DRACULA?"<p>No, fuck you, Zynga. And Dracula shouldn't even be a playable word.

The same goes for Notification bubbles!!!!!!<p>I have deleted some games from my system because they display notification bubbles above the icon or app folder. That drives me insane. A few examples I can call out are Halfbrick studios. Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja both do this too often for my taste and have been removed from my phone because of it. These are particularly bad examples because of how many taps it takes to actually show and clear the notification. I wish there was an opt out with these things as it disturbs my OCD to have a clean desktop and no notification bubbles.

First reaction to this: "Wow, that must be annoying, I'm glad I don't have these apps. What were the developers thinking, how do they get away with these shady practices?"<p>Second reaction: "Perhaps they are doing something right and we should be doing that in our apps. Perhaps younger people actually like such things, after all they get dozens of sms every day and it makes them feel important/liked?"

"As a result, users are starting to reflexively reject app requests to send push notifications."<p>Source? An actual, non-vague stat? Proof?

OK, so there is gratuitous use of push notifications, but it's also unfair to compare push usage between a utility app and apps that are trying to convince you to try something new.<p>How about we compare the pushes to email campaigns by companies?<p>I for one am constantly amazed at how much users tolerate these emails.<p>So I say, yes, make it easier to stop the pushes just like it's easy to unsubscribe from email campaigns. It could be as easy as making sure users know that the pushes stop when the app is uninstalled.<p>But I think outside of other app developers and the tech community, users may not feel as strongly that this is abuse.

At the very least they should ban apps that have a way where no matter how many times you check it, the icon always has the little (1) on it. GetGlue was doing this for a while, but it appears they stopped.

TaskRabbit was abusing them as well. We should do our best to shame any organization that sends spam via push notifications.

The same is true of in-app purchases. How many scammy "buy 3000 mojo points!" apps are out there now? At this point I don't even bother with an app if I see in-app purchases. Shame for those who use them correctly, like Alien Blue.

The one that's been killing me lately are the notifications from the new He-Man game for iPhone. I have yet to figure out how to turn off push notifications for this app, it's not in the in-game settings or in the Settings app and I know I never enabled them in any dialogs. I just randomly get random messages about how I'm not doing a good enough job saving Eternia. If I can't figure this out soon the game is gone.<p>Isn't this the kind of abuse that the app store approval process should be addressing? If notifications are supported, then they should be required to be configurable in the Settings app, no exceptions.

I've been calling Facebook Notifications the Push Notification of the Web, they are great, maybe just as good as native Push Notifications. But they have also "solved" (it's new and yet to see) the spam problem recently by implementing harsh restrictions on how you as a developer can send them. It would be interesting if Apple and Google copied this behavior. Basically Apps that send &#62; 50000 notifications a week have to maintain a 17% Click-To-Impression ratio. However I find the 50K an oddly picked number which should instead be based on installed user base.

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is intentional. A big problem with computer security is that people just blindly click "OK" to any sort of authorization prompt. Ever since push notification abuse started to get bad, I've been much more careful about reading the authorization prompts that my phone throws up, after authorizing some apps for push notifications without thinking through the implications, then having to manually turn them off later.

The Instacart notifications are just insane. I got into the early beta and never used the app a single time because of the sheer volume of annoying pushes I'd get.

Apple needs to start engaging in Pagerank-style ranking of applications in the store, and including metrics like "number of push notifications sent, per user" in the calculation. Please also include "number of applications per developer".<p>And please revise the guidelines such that if in-app purchases are turned off on the phone, showing the user a catalog or purchases screen is grounds for rejection.

Those notifications are the "fucking horror". I uninstall any app (on Android, mind you) that does that.<p>heck, i even dislike the notifications when the app is on the foreground (specially the apps begging for rating on the market: when i get one, i just go put one star). but the background ones are TRUE EVIL. :P

Just tap Don't Allow.<p>Edit: More seriously, all four of those suggestions are very good, and I'd like to see them too. For #4, a deep link to the app's notification settings would be good enough, and probably more likely than getting a notification settings controller in UIKit.

I hate all notifications except my morning alarm clock. I don't want to be interrupted.

I am not for "Provide a feedback mechanism that allows users to report spammy notifications, and crack down on abusive apps." because 'what is' spam is highly subjective, and this can be used against the App to bring down even genuine Apps! I wouldn't agree that we can let the iPhone user remain ignorant of what is all this about Push Notifications! If the user bought the iPhone, if the user 'chose to' install the App, then it falls upon the user to learn how to use it! Is it not? When we buy, say, a new electronic equipment, say a new refrigerator, is it not upon us to learn about how to use it controls?

Same is also true for facebook notifications. I recently got a notification that said "Blabla has given you a free movie on Flixster." Now, I am actually down to try a service that gives me a free movie rental. But because of my past experience with fb notifications, I immediately hit 'Ignore' thinking it was another gimmicky spam.<p>Facebook has focused so much at Games that I think it will begin to hurt them when more well-known businesses in other categories try to use their platform to distribute offers.

As mentioned before, Local Notifications can be equally spammy, are impossible to turn off, and are visually indistinguishable from push notifications.<p>The are also not subject to a strict interpretation of the app review guidelines.<p>The only limitation is that they need to be set ahead of time when the app is active, or triggered by one of the background modes (geofencing, significant location change, task completion, Bluetooth LE, etc.)

I think this could be solved with a simple like/dislike button for notifications.<p>If that type of notification is unwanted you could, dislike it and it would suppress notifications of that type for ... x days. If you do it enough, it would disable it. If enough of the apps notifications are disliked then the apps notification privileges get suspended all together.

I can't for the life of me figure out how to disable Embark NYC's push notification.<p>My biggest problem now, however, is getting push notifications from Letterpress at 4AM, because the person I play with is on the other side of the continent.<p>There should be an adittional setting to require permission for a specified window of time like, say, 1AM to 8AM.

May be developers should provide the frequency (x) of push notifications at the time of requesting access. And Apple should ensure not more than x notifications were sent to a device? Something along the lines: XYZ App would like to send you push notifications. Freq: 2/day, 1/week, User set [Allow] [Deny].

They should take Growl's approach of forcing developers to declare all possible notifications that an app can send, so that they could examine their texts and purposes during review process. It would also grant a possibility for a user to enable/disable notifications individually.

I rarely allow apps to send me push notifications. Only very selectively do I allow it and even then my patience is short. For the average user this may be an issue but I've found my approach handles the situation very nicely.

Would a simple "stop showing me these" on each notification work?

This is the number one reason I find my iPhone irritating (in practice) -- apps keep abusing even local notifications and those should be off by default unless I allow it.

I don't think there are really any good reasons to use push notifications. I have them disabled on all the apps I install and don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.

What I love on android is I can just strike-through any privilege I don't want an app to have, like internet access. This might be a cyanogenmod-only feature though.

This, and the crapware problem on Windows, seem like two instances of the same underlying problem. What could a general solution look like?

First thing I turn off on all apps. If, after a spell, I find that I miss push notifications on a given app, then I will turn it on.

Facebook apps went through the same problems years ago. I don't think facebook ever managed to settle on a solution.

i generally say no to notifications. I don't have anything mission critical on email that I need to know "right this second" and twitter and fb updates I only want when I want them, otherwise they're a huge distraction..

For all the weird ad/spam accusations I've heard against Android, it shocks me how much this seems to be an iOS issue. I can say I've never, ever had a problem with this in Android, and if I did, most every app that I use that I can think of allows me to enabled/disable different types of notifications (FB/Twitter/etc). It's also a tiny bit amusing that one of the solutions is to make the Settings more sane and make them live inside their application like Android.