Websites also can't spam you with push notifications the way installed apps can, so I strongly prefer them as a user. But I suspect this is one reason companies like apps.

I'm not sure whether it's my imagination, but this seems to have gotten a lot worse in the past year or two, and is no longer limited to apps from shady no-name companies. Apps from reputable companies used to try to have some plausible reason related to your actual use of the app for a notification, but lately Yelp and Hotwire have just started brazenly spamming ads unrelated to any activity. So I uninstalled those two, and am now much more resistant to installing new ones.

>Websites also can't spam you with push notifications the way installed apps can, so I strongly prefer them as a user.

On Android, at least, you can disable notifications on a per-app basis. Press and hold on a notification, touch the icon that appears, and uncheck the notifications checkbox on the next screen.

I'm not sure it can be done directly from the notification, but on iOS you can also disable notifications per app and specify how it should be displayed (pop up vs at the top etc.)

I've also noticed an increasing amount of apps that now also use the notifications for ads. Definitely not what I like to see on my lock screen.

>I've also noticed an increasing amount of apps that now also use the notifications for ads. Definitely not what I like to see on my lock screen.

Once again, Apple is lagging behind by several years ;) This kind of Ad used to be incredibly common on Android for a while, but Google eventually stepped in and banned these sort of apps from the store. Honestly, I'm a little surprised that Apple allows them.

http://phandroid.com/2013/09/30/google-play-notification-ads...

While it's gotten rid of the worst spam (apps sending totally unrelated ads as notifications), unfortunately there are holes in that policy big enough to still drive a busload of junk notifications through, as long as they're somehow related to the app:

> Apps and their ads must not display advertisements through system level notifications on the user’s device, unless the notifications derive from an integral feature provided by the installed app. (e.g., an airline app that notifies users of special deals, or a game that notifies users of in-game promotions).

To me those are still pretty spammy. An airline app notifying me that a flight I have a ticket for is delayed would be one thing; that's a legitimate use of system-level notifications. But an airline app vibrating my phone, just to announce that AirlineName Has Great Deals To The Caribbean In Our End Of Summer Sale? That is not ok, but Google allows it. I assume this is also how Yelp is able to send that kind of junk notification without getting banned.

This can be done via a checkbox on the app's info page. It's nice to know it can also be done directly from the notification too, that's even more convenient.

It's the same checkbox - the icon that appears after pressing and holding on the notification takes you to the app's info page.

There's a web feature for push notifications; I got a dialogue box asking me if I wanted to enable it for Facebook the other day. It was easy enough to push No (since push notifications were one of the reasons I got rid of the @#$%er in the first place), but many people will still get those.

The fact that you can choose no is precisely what makes the Web so good. The fact that you can block ads at all, that you can disable JS, that the Tor Browser bundle can be so simple to use, that you can easily get URLs to things, that you can copy text, are all huge benefits of the Web.

Ever tried getting a URL to some Facebook content on mobile? The only way that I've found is to "Send as Message" (Facebook for Android only implements sharing inside Facebook, there's no way to share via email or anything like that), choose myself in the contacts list, then go to Messenger, open the link in a browser, and copy the URL from there. It's infuriating.

You can turn off push notifications for normal apps on Android, too.

But it's opt out vs opt in which is a huge difference.

Really? Huge difference? I would say about 20% (being generous with that number) of the good apps that I install try to misuse the notification. I don't find it that hard to disable the notifications for them. The benefits of notifications outweigh the spamming by a lot.

iOS is Opt-In

I'm glad the feature exists. I removed the Facebook app from my Android phone and am happy to just receive web notifications now.

>Websites also can't spam you with push notifications

I remember reading about this a while ago; not sure how widely implemented this feature is

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...

Unlike with iOS or Android, in HTML5 invasive APIs (including notifications) are all opt-in. Each permission is granular, instead of needing to choose between granting all permissions an app requires or none. IMO this is a massive improvement.

Although you could grant notification access to an app and then it could become a bad actor, I expect on the web you will be able to be far more choosy about granting access than with an app.

I believe Android is doing something to bring in granular permissions, there was discussion at Google I/O this year.

Push notifications are opt-in and granular on iOS as well. You are prompted to approve each permission for each app, push notifications, location services, access to contacts, etc.

I had to kill the My Fitness Pal app on my Android because the notification dispatch was inside some kind of infinite loop where my phonr would not stop vibrating even after disabling notifications in their UI.

>Websites also can't spam you with push notifications the way installed apps can, so I strongly prefer them as a user. But I suspect this is one reason companies like apps

poorly maintained or non-efficient backend that didn't take note of whether the user receive a push or not leads to this problem. It's not the app problem itself totall

Theres quite a set of privacy concerns wrt tracking and data sharing while using the browser as well. Seems like even drawbacks on all sides at best.

Apps are just as bad. Worse because you can't see if you're transmitting over https or not.

You could argue that apps are worse since they can cert pin and prevent you from mitm'ing your https traffic - you have no clue what data is being sent.

With browsers (for now, Chrome on iOS may start/be cert pinning) you can install a cert and still mitm.

>My brother and one friend each have a few hundred apps installed on their phones. I am sometimes surprised that their phones still function with so much cruft installed, never mind the privacy considerations.

This is a common misconception (also concerning desktop OS "bloat").

As long as those apps are not running at the same time and competing for CPU resources, they could have 100000 apps installed and no issue at all.

Especially with sandboxing and automated resource management in iOS (probably Android too, but not too familiar with it).

Hmm, not necessarily. Unless the user is careful, it's possible that many of those apps would request data in the background, etc., which would result in performance issues.

I mean, Twitter only makes sense when a third party digests their API. The default web client is broken (sometimes intentionally) in many, many ways. Perhaps I'm misreading you?

Of course YMMV, but my go-to is the Mac native client that they themselves put out. Not the web client, but not third-party. I don't have trouble with it.

Another interesting aspect is app size. These days, when many complain that the entry level iPhone only has 16GB of storage, it's nice not to have to install ~200MB social apps.

Here's my question about web vs apps--is the privacy different?

It feels like using different apps is like using separate "browser profiles" for each website, which is possibly what I want--it's so difficult to compartmentalize on mobile browsers. So things at least seem isolated to a greater extent than using the same web-browser for everything?