This app helps sick patients navigate the healthcare system. Notifications were requested by users so that they don't need to continuously go back to the web app to see if there are any updates.

How about sending notifications over email?

See this post[1]. We already do text and email notifications. Not all phones and tablets get texts, and email notifications are unreliable. Many users wanted desktop and mobile notifications, hence why we implemented them on top of texts and emails.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26520303

I use apps like this to manage my health care. Email would be a significantly worse experience than notifications.

This speaks to your inexperience in making applications for the average user - they barely use email.

> This speaks to your inexperience in making applications for the average user - they barely use email.

Do you find that most users do authentication via phone number instead of email?

The speaks to your inexperience making applications - using anecdotes and assumptions about "the average user" to determine what to do is nowhere near as useful as asking your actual users. Real data is better than guesswork.

I have built global apps, and found that users struggle to even accept email address confirmations. The reality is that email is dying.

> users struggle to even accept email address confirmations

This experience is geographically or demographically unique.

That's true for the users you've seen. My users all open emails with no problem.

Now do you see why "the average user" isn't useful to determine how to build something? Even if most people suck at using email, in my app it works well.

So you would agree that some users can prefer notifications over email/sms, or is that line of reasoning only self-serving?

I absolutely agree that different groups of users want different things. An "average user" isn't useful in determining that.

Which is exactly why you can continue emailing your users, while others like me would like an option to use notifications and other PWA features.

> This speaks to your inexperience

Please be kind and not sneer as the guidelines suggest.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You could easily reword you comment to.

> In my experience the average user barely uses email.

Unless you know parent commenter personally I don't think you're competent enough to judge their experience in an online discussion.

I agree. Most websites use push notifications for the wrong reasons. This has given them a bad reputation. But when properly used they are certainly powerful and useful.

I use them for some local forums to notify me of replies. Don't want to fill up my inbox for this.

Great. Take their phone number and text them. Amazon charges what, $0.00645 per SMS?

You want to send potentially sensitive health updates over SMS? Or just a link, that then opens the web-app anyways? Definitely sounds like bad UX.

CVS has no problem sending text notifications. You can send informative alerts without any sensitive info.

Push notifications are subject to the same HIPPA rules as sms. You can’t included sensitive info.

Push notifications go through apple/google servers. The advantage of PWA notifications is that they can be local - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web....

You don’t get it, 100s of billion of these notifications have been shown already to users on desktop with a less than 1% accept rate. These are spam .

What a weird argument. We're not talking about suspicious blogospam sites asking for notification access here. By the same token, most email sent is spam. Should we stop using email?

Spammy notification requests should be mitigated with better browser guards for requesting them. The fact that there is spam does not somehow invalidate that there are legitimate use cases people want them for.

If 99% of something is used by spam and not opened it makes a strong argument to remove said feature.

Here in California, I got updates about my covid19 test results, and my covid19 appointment information, over SMS or a link over SMS.

This includes what vaccine I received, the lot number of its production, plus information from v-safe[1] and reminders to check in telling the government how I feel on days after the vaccine.

1. https://vsafe.cdc.gov/en/

What a terrible ux

Why? Text messages are great because they pop up on my Mac too.

This - email and text notifications go everywhere for me. Web ones don’t follow what device I’m using

I don't like browser notifications, especially on mobile. Maybe it's me but there's no explicit place agreed upon between me and the browser where the browser says "if the site sends a notification, here is where it will be".

Mobile is already bad enough where if you swipe a notification away, well I hope you remembered the icon and the bit of context that was on that notification. Browser notifications just make this worse.

And then there's the whole "will I get a notification if the browser app is closed? What if I get a notification in the middle of the night, will I receive it in the morning? Will it continue to receive notifications if I restart my phone?" kind of questions. Maybe it all just works but I am very untrusting of the whole feature.

Technically, webpush-enabled site starts a service on your phone (read on js service workers) that then asks a browser to accept notifications from some origin and sends permission credentials to that origin. Then it decides for every incoming notification if it is worth popping up (e.g. if a site is a chat and it is already on the screen, there is no need to spam with popups), or if it’s worth a new tab on tap/click, etc. It is a hassle to configure, but then it usually just works. I suspect that your browser has to be running anyway, because a service worker is just a restricted browser env. Push providers may have delayed delivery, at least there is a ttl field in a notification at server-side. Didn’t test that much and only used that in one project, but remote alpha users already reported missing notifications. I have no clue how to debug that, because it simply doesn’t happen (phone config seems okay).

There's nothing stopping Safari having a less annoying implementation of notifications. They have full control of the experience.

Similarly, I’ve rarely needed web notifications and on the handful of occasions I have they’re of a nature that’s better tied to a desktop/laptop than a phone or tablet.

lichess notifies when it is your turn, quite useful. There are many legitimate uses of this feature especially business environments.