> Do you find them useful for apps? Email?

No. I can check my email on my own time.

> Messaging apps?

Same. I can check my messages when I feel I have time to.

> Taxi apps notifying you when the taxi arrives?

Not really. Usually I can see when the taxi is arriving. (I almost never call a taxi anyways).

> Calendar?

Yes, that's the only case in my opinion when notifications are useful, otherwise I tend to forget meetings (not that all meetings are useful though).

> I can check my messages when I feel I have time to.

You don't see any utility in getting alerted when you get a text message? Most messaging apps allow you to mute threads, so silencing an active group chat is easy, but you don't have anybody in your life you want to be able to get through to you ASAP?

> Usually I can see when the taxi is arriving. (I almost never call a taxi anyways).

Sure, if you're waiting out in front of the building for a short time. Sometimes ride-sharing / taxi apps have a long wait. Most people appreciate being able to wait indoors, instead of sitting on the stoop for 20 minutes waiting for your ride to come. This is possible because the app will notify you when your driver is getting close enough that you should go outside.

> you don't have anybody in your life you want to be able to get through to you ASAP?

They can call, can't they? My phone does ring (usually ;-)

My kids don't even have a data plan, so most of the time they are unable to use messaging apps (WhatsApp, etc.) They are also forbidden to use a phone in school (in fact they're forbidden to have a phone, but alas everyone ignores this).

What good this urgency would do anyway, when I'm not around? I'm not god. If something bad happens and I'm ten miles away (or a hundred!) anyone trying to call me will get more help from someone near.

And the second a single one of those apps sends me a promotional offer via a push notification I disable notifications wholesale, negating the entire benefit of this 'feature'. I don't want to have to run and maintain a spam filter for notifications.

Same. But there are plenty of apps that don't abuse their notification privileges (or allow you to disable the marketing notifications separately from the useful ones).

> I don't want to have to run and maintain a spam filter for notifications.

Maybe the OS should run and maintain that for you. Just as gmail automatically sorts your emails into different categories (and spam), maybe so the OS or the browser should sort notifications.

That would still need enforcement. Google and Apple would need to adopt a no-strikes policy and remove apps which send a marketing notification to the "your food has arrived" notification channel.

No strikes? So kick them off before they even do anything wrong?

One strike means one chance to screw up, zero strikes means...

No. Three strikes means you're out on the third strike, not the fourth.

That's usually when I uninstall these apps myself. Though on Android you can usually get the ad spam down by disabling it once in my experience.

That being said, it's been years since any apps have tried to push promotions onto me through notifications. I honestly don't know what app hellscape you and so many others online seem to live in; to me, notification ads have died a swift death somewhere around 2012.

That's silly. I don't know what kind of phone you have, but on my android phone you can specify which types of notifications you want to opt out of. It takes like 2 clicks to opt out of promotional messages but leave important notifications active.

Many apps don't bother separating their notifications by type.

Do I want those apps to be slow, sluggish, non-native feeling web apps?

Isn't that already the case, only with a thin wrapper to handle notifications?

I've seen many apps on iOS that just feel… weird. Especially the scroll. It's my understanding that many such apps are just web views.

Are you referring to web apps where scroll is hijacked by JS in some way? Because I don’t see how you can get more native than the default browser’s default scroll implementation.

The browsers default scroll implementation never feels like scrolling in native apps.

Even Safari? It's about as native as you can get. I've seen no evidence it uses different scroll logic than whatever "native" app. In fact many "native" apps that reinvented the wheel in their GUI framework have a decidedly worse scroll than many web apps.

I swear there was an article on the WebKit blog that detailed how the scrolling was different, but am not able to find it now.

Exactly. And if I have alternatives that are native, I use those or mostly just do without.

Anyone doing non-native apps on my phone will almost[0] never get money from me.

[0] There has to be the occasional exception, I suppose.

Yes, because they will have a harder time tracking you and taking control over your phone and its data.

Also web apps are not censored by the app store guidelines.

Are you seriously arguing that the web does a better job of respecting user privacy than desktop and mobile operating systems?

Yes. Mobile and desktop apps have much more data leakage because they can store more data for longer and have much more APIs to use. A mobile app provides 100x more detailed data with more persistence than a website ever could.

This is well understood by the adtech industry and is why so many websites push apps in the first place.

Historically I think you are right but I'm not so sure it's still the case.

Do you think an iPhone with the tracking blocker engaged is still a richer source of data than the web app on an iPhone? Facebook claims that Apple's privacy protections cost them $10 billion of revenue the first year.

Yes. Apple's changes have reduced tracking in both modalities but webapps are far more constricted by Safari than native apps.

Yes that is what he's saying. It's also the truth and the only reason every social media forced you to use the app.

No, that's not why. It's because it's hard to make a performant Facebook webapp with all the bells and whistles.

Yes.

When i close the webpage, that page is gone. It's not running in the background silently collecting data. With a properly configured browser (a few extensions, no third party cookies, or even separate containers), it doesn't have much data to gather in the first place.

> Also web apps are not censored by the app store guidelines.

Neither is any of the apps on custom F-Droid repos.

Sure. But we all know that even if the only reason it exists is because of useful applications that the marketing departments will abuse it, because to them 'push' translates into 'your undivided attention'. That's why every fifth website wants you to enable this - and then good luck if you want to disable it again.

The iOS implementation doesn't allow this. You have to add the app to your homescreen (i.e. "install" it) to allow it to even request permissions. This is actually for web apps.

> This is actually for web apps.

I'm aware of that. iOS is a proprietary OS and how it does things isn't all that relevant to me in this context. The web is a different matter and I've yet to see a use case of push notifications that served me. But I've seen 100's of websites that I have zero reason to see as useful applications trying to trick me into allowing them to use push notifications.

The context here is that Safari (incl. mobile safari) just added support. Every other browser has supported this for years. I agree that the implementation in Chrome that allows websites to request notification permissions on any page load is pretty annoying. But this UI is not a necessary part of this feature.

From an android POV, the benefit of this feature is that it allows you to install fully featured apps while keeping them in the web sandbox where you have fine-grained control over permissions.

> I agree that the implementation in Chrome that allows websites to request notification permissions on any page load is pretty annoying.

FF does pretty much the same thing.

With phone apps I sort of get it: you are already installing something and clearly have a long-term relationship with the provider of such an app and the app likely has functionality that you need badly enough that having the app alert you makes sense.

But for me the web is 'transient', even as the maker of a SPA I wouldn't dream of bugging my users outside of their own decision to come back to the site. All this needy software is - to me - just a source of irritation.

When I last checked a few years ago, self-hosted Discourse forums needed to self-publish an app to have push notifications on iOS. Hopefully that won't be the case anymore, it's a great community communications platform.

You can prevent them from asking you by turning off that feature in the browser settings. It’s the 2nd thing I do when I sit down in front of a computer for the first time. (First is install ublock-origin).

On iphone 1 in 10 000 knows how to do that.

I used to think this. Then I learned/realised how absolutely crappy the tooling available to those marketing departments is. The solution is for push to not be a manually run operation, it has to be run entirely by a kind of hybrid reinforcement learning system that can automatically manage the explore/exploit tradeoff in order to learn a person's preferences and then update its assessment as those preferences change over time.

No, no, no, no, no and also... no.

and before you whine about taxis, it only takes a half second to open the app. If you need a ding on your phone you should probably walk home.

On my laptop? While I'm working? Hell no. No, no, no, and never.

I am a little (just a little) more tolerant on my phone.

Calendar is acceptable because I set each and every notification.

An taxi app might be acceptable because it has real world usage, but I imagine it would be abused pretty heavily with "first mile is free if you take a taxi tonight".

Email and messaging apps should not notify me. I will open them if/when I have the time and batch process them.

My ability to concentrate is already under enough assult and doesn't need to be harmed further, and while I am in favour of each person doing what they want, from a societal point of view we need way fewer distractions, not more.