For this reason I have a one strike policy for apps. One marketing notification and permissions are revoked. Missing out on surprisingly little although it has made me stop using some services entirely.
"But it's not as convenient!" I hear some yell. Then it's obviously not enough of a bother to you, so just suck it up and deal with their bad behavior.
Because until you take your money elsewhere, nothing will change. And why should it? They obviously haven't crossed a line for enough people. Which means it'll just get worse.
Society’s revealed preference is McDonald’s, watching YouTube ads, and letting apps send whatever notifications they want to.
In general people care about the trade offs between cost and convenience, between cost and style, and not at all about anything so mundane as value, privacy, or peace of mind.
Without government restrictions, is society's revealed preference also widespread use of hard drugs?
Ever since opium wars, unadressed drug use was a problem that required active internevtion.
Most of America is a "bait and switch" or a "rug pull." This article basically talks about those issues with workers. [1] America sayssss "work hard, be loyal, be honest, be virtuous" how America acts is "Reward lazy humans, reward dishonesty / backstabbing, reward vice (pride, lust, greed are pretty much America)."
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221... Stanley, Matthew L., Christopher B. Neck, and Christopher P. Neck. "Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 106 (2023): 104442.
Why do you even need a Starbucks app in the first place? Get a physical loyalty card.
Or, you know, have coffee at home
Nescafe Gold Instant coffee. Coffee is coffee, and this one tastes better than Starbucks'
I, as a consumer would appreciate this.
Instagram I had to disable from notifications entirely, so now I miss messages from friends frequently, because the app bombards you with so much unrelated junk.
I suspect these companies know this, they know we don’t want spurious notifications, but they abuse whatever notification policies the OS provides in order to deliver you them anyways.
You can't actually manage these notifications until re-opening the door, re-enabling them.
There are currently six categories in here. Who wants to take bets until these shift, nullifying the point?
I use Apple Pay exclusively at Starbucks. They haven’t a clue who I am.
Then I call them a jerk, turn off all nonessential notifications and give them one more strike.
Interestingly, this works half the time.
I’m waiting for Apple to eventually fix this and expect this is how they’ll implement local AI with having really nice notification filters of “block messages like this.”
Of course google could do this, but I don’t think they’re interested in reducing notifications and popups based on the number of times google asks if I want to sign in or use my local to improve results. I’ve clicked “no” thousands of times yet they persist in asking.
Google and Apple could instantly fix the problem (of co-mingling essential and marketing notifications) if they wanted to. The current situation is like getting opted in to "street signs and flashing billboards". It's stupid.
In general this is a fast way off my handset.
The problem is that these apps are essentially adversarial in their notifications. If you have a mechanism for “only the most essential notifications”, then they simply mark all their notifications as “essential” (looking at you Uber). Try to limit their notifications using “only is summary” or disabling them and the app will gleefully deny you all notifications, rendering it basically useless. Uber is particular is guilty for this - the app is conspicuously free of meaningful notification controls.
It's a bit of pain to turn it on before use, and off again afterwards, but I've realized it's much less stressful than having notifications popping up at all times.
YMMV
That's like getting spam mail from your bank. In the physical world this would be illegal
Apparently that last bit would probably not have survived an actual legal fight, but they never sent him any more junk mail.
(This was pre-GDPR, so perhaps things have changed?)
Perfectly legal.
For example I got an Apple Music notification the other day telling me how awesome the new Classic Music App is, or how the new season of whatever show is available in Apple TV+ is just fresh out of the oven.
I like their products, and even their services, but in this particular case, they're as bad as Uber, just at a different degree (I used to get an Uber Eats notification everyday until I uninstalled the app)
But at first, the app must ask you for notification permission to send any notification in the first place.
You can then turn on/off the self declared notification categories at the Android level but apps can be dicks and either not use the categories or misuse them.
then perhaps Apple should say to them “either don’t mark these kinds of notifications as essential, or you get removed from the App Store”?
I'm sure we'll get that soon. Enforcing notification categories is unfeasible for all apps.
They’re doing the psychological equivalent of slash-and-burn deforestation - there won’t be a next generation of engineers, just a legion of addicts with attention spans measured in microseconds, but it’s profitable this quarter, and that’s all that matters.
But careful the app developer that abuses this position, for they will more likely be the app I remove from my phone.
Uber is one egregious example of abuse of notifications + SMS spam
My phone is a tool, not a boss.
Airline apps haven’t been problematic though. I give location only while using the app. And I’ve never received advertising notifications.
It’s quite nice to pull down an eticket into Apple Wallet and have it on my watch.
Where it's possible to do the thing you want to do with a web browser (also with minimal permissions, natch), never install the app.
Come on, now. You're being unfair. It is also serves the purpose of being better able to collect data on you for sale to other entities which want to push marketing notifications at you.
I like to use the apps to activate pumps to avoid card skimming but lol I'll just use the other gas station chains not run by disrespectful corporate (even though I could just block the notifications in Android)
That is more forgiving than my policy. Under the same condition, that app gets removed from my phone.
Then, yes, the next step is just to remove the app and leave an appropriate review. A demonstrably adversarial app has no place in my life.
Yup, this is very easy to do on Android. Long-press any notification, and you can change the notification preferences for that app.
The first time I see a marketing notification, I gag that app permanently. Takes less than 3 seconds. If this also prevents that app from being useful, oh well, time to uninstall.
In theory, Android apps can also categorize their notifications, so I could selectively gag them. But this takes me at least 30 seconds to figure out, and it doesn't prevent that app developer from abusing their categories. So I almost never attempt fine-grained control, unless it's an essential app. Normally I just block all notifications permanently on the first offense.
Usually it's something like "Group x has a new post, click to read it now!" where X is a group I haven't visited in years and would never give me a notification before. So I click "Only get notifications for friends posts in this group" and then it happens again with one-three other random groups the next week.
It's all about trying to get the user to spend the most amount of time in the app.
But more importantly, how does it differentiate between "Your delivery has arrived" and "this weekend, 10% off all deliveries paid with mastercard from chase banks"
These are all trillion dollar companies, your allegiance is wasted.
>>that something Google has created works better
Does it? The system for categorizing notification does exist on android, but it's not enforced in any way by Google on the Play Store so most devs ignore it - do you take an issue with anything I said?
Of course changing any setting on Teams has catastrophic unpredictable effects on it... But at least they tried.
I tend to use "Focus Mode" turned on always in Android. Most apps are short lived (5 min after being opened manually), this reduces a lot of the spam. I automate extending this time using the same FilterBox to auto click the notification that the app will close in a minute, but only if the screen is turned on. So the app gets automatically disabled when I stop using the phone.
IIUC it is up to the app developer to tag the notifications they generate as time sensitive (or not) for iOS
Probably through a pinky promise from the developers to call the right APIs.
As long as they get flagged, they’d need to pay more and more.
Sometimes I think "should I install it" before getting one and get public transport or get on my bike instead.
I don't understand the credit part? Wouldn't some kind of "set your rate" option for the user, allow more individual flexibility? As opposed to a flat fee per notif, sent to Apple?
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¹ I vaguely recall hearing that EU spam legislation would apply to notifications, but I may be wrong or misremembering. For my home jurisdiction of Australia, the Spam Act 2003 may or may not cover them; it depends on whether these things count as “electronic messages”, a term which is defined in the Act as “a message sent: (a) using: (i) an internet carriage service; or (ii) any other listed carriage service; and (b) to an electronic address in connection with: (i) an email account; or (ii) an instant messaging account; or (iii) a telephone account; or (iv) a similar account.” As a technologist, I would expect push notifications—that is, notifications sent by the app provider’s server via Apple/whoever servers to your device—to meet this classification; but that it would be less clear-cut with notifications generated directly by the app, as there’s not so obviously an electronic address involved.
Maybe (maybe!) large players will pay attention as they have a lot to lose and aren’t able to ‘dodge’ well. But there are millions of fly by night scam operations that come and go.
Only real solution here is, like email, user side filtering and infrastructure level black holeing of offenders.
As far as email is concerned, a part of the problem that leads to moderately generic spam is that addresses are often readily available, and there are then no technical means to stop the sending of the message (… though filtering can block receiving the message). The difference with push notifications is that each provider gets a unique address to send to, and you have to at least install an app or accept push notifications (on the web) before they get that address, which guards against the completely casual you-don’t-want-any-notifications crew.
Sounds like Australia is pretty mellow. The US often is not.
In the US, I usually get at least 4-5 spam calls a day (post filtering). I used to get dozens before I setup filtering. Sometimes even two at once!
At one point during the bad days (a year or two ago), after I made the mistake of putting my actual phone number in a .us domain registration (no privacy filters), I got 20+ a day. Usually from India. Sometimes even at 2am!
If the infrastructure provider gets paid for the spam directly or indirectly (USPS, phone system, perhaps Apple too via App Store commissions?) then they’ll only stop the really ridiculous and egregious abusers.
If the end user has some control (either via opting out or via filtering), it can cut it down much more. But without tooling it’s still an uphill battle.
They don’t need the experience to be good, just better than the alternatives. Completely cutting it off is not an acceptable alternative for most.
Your comment about ‘easy to get’ email addresses made me chuckle, because having an actual valid email address is actually a response to early spamming!
It used to be, you could use any email address (or send from any IP), even if it wasn’t valid or deliverable and it would go through. Those days faded quickly.
Then came DNS black lists. Then SpamAssassin, which worked pretty good actually (that was cutting edge), and it started to work in Bayesian filtering + weighting of various lists.
Then Gmail et al. and their proprietary filtering software. Then DKIM, etc.
I’m curious what the options will look like for notifications.
The iOS platform controls are problematic as it makes it hard to explore the space of options organically via third party apps (a SpamAssassin for App notifications would be awesome!).
All the focus hacks and weird rules are just too complicated for almost anyone to understand, hence the ‘DND all the time’. It would be like manual blacklist curation for email. Maybe they’ll allow a pluggable integration point there, like password managers for passwords?
At some point a critical mass of users will start DND’ng all the time, or it will even start becoming ‘cool’ to just not have a phone at all or something, and the platform folks will have to start taking a stand.
Or... a float?
Apple isn't interested in fixing this, they allowed it to happen in the first place.
Similarly, a cookie blocker can't be a domain blacklist because the people on the list could sue, but it can be an obfusticated ML model.
I gripe at them pretty consistently and the various customer service people don't even know the basics of how the app functions. I'm sure someone is really proud that their campaign to harass all of their paying users has led to some number of subscription upgrades though.
As a baseline have about half a dozen things on my phone that actually actively interrupt me. Calendar, alarms, weather alerts, banking, and, yes, messages from my wife. I have a few more that can send notifications but they don’t alert me, they all get rolled up into the “Notification Center” for me to review whenever I feel like catching up on them. (This includes direct contacts like SMS from anyone else on my “allow” list.)
During work hours Slack can notify me as well. If I get any notifications outside of work hours, they’ll appear when my phone goes back to work mode.
After 9pm the only things that can notify me are phone calls from a handful of people. The notifications will be there in the morning.
When I’m driving I can only receive phone calls from my wife.
This is a whitelist, not a blacklist. I have to consciously decide to receive notifications from something and when I want to receive them.
The focuses turn themselves on and off throughout the week without me doing anything.
If I’m expecting something (e.g., scheduled telehealth call), I’ll just turn focus off around the time I need to receive the notifications and deal with the firehose until it’s done. (Used to do the same for food deliveries and stuff until I moved to the middle of nowhere and stopped doing that.)
I truly don’t understand how people live with their phones otherwise.
I need the notifications for a taxi not marketing for groceries during the week
It may juice their stats, but I've definitely installed competitors apps when I need a taxi in a new place as opposed to just using the app I already have installed.
best part is how all of these uis say "not now" or "maybe later" type of phrases cuz some overpaid PM thinks it will increase usage
If your app wakes me up with a pointless notification, it gets uninstalled for at least a month and a one-star review on both Apple and Android app stores.
It's stunning to me that Google let's them get away with pushing ads through notifications.
I also just think it’s a weird leaky abstraction to bubble up to user space. I’m just imagining my mom looking at a notification channels area in settings. It’s a weird thing to ask users to conceptualize. Also it’s not something you can really enforce at review-time. It would be something Apple and Google would need to constantly monitor — at any time a VC could ask their investees to turn the screws on monetization/engagement and an app could become a spam machine overnight.
Something better would be something like a non-removable option to report individual notifications from any app as spam, kinda like how it works will email. That way, Apple and Google could offload their monitoring overhead to machine learning models and punish companies acting in bad faith whenever there’s enough user frustration to justify punishment
I really just think individual notifications (not apps) just need an explicit “this is spam” report button.
I do that sometimes. Not that it matters, because rarely any notification seems to deep-link into an app these days.
That doesn't follow, IMO. I have tons of communication platforms that aren't allowed to notify.
Typing this all out, these are all young people things so i don't expect someone with kids and a mortgage to have the same experience but imagine if your sms app was littered with ads and you couldn't turn off their notifications without missing messages from your children needing assistance. That's basically the type of dirty attention capture these companies are engaging in.
If you don't understand why someone would use snapchat or other image based social messaging apps then you won't understand this particular issue as you don't have it.
I have Slack and MS Outlook on my phone for work, which are both communication apps, but notifications are muted.
They have an option to opt out of marketing notifications but they ignore it if you check that and still send sometimes daily notifications of sales through of their crap.
Sending too many emails or too many notifications has an evident and enormous cost when you measure it (in lost opportunities that effective notifications could bring you). If your employer does not know what the threshold should be and does not routinely cancel certain notifications or emails because they don’t meet that bar, they are losing a lot of money. It’s probably the most accessible and impactful project you could work on if you want to prove your value.
Perhaps not in the App but in the OS there is. On Android you can pull a notification to the side to reveal a settings icon. Open it and click the settings icon in the top right to reveal granular app notification settings and the option to completely disable notifications.
Now I’m shocked how often people’s phones “ding” at them. I’ve shared what I do, but most find it too scary that they will “miss something important.”
My long-term bet is that notifications will become the new “smoking” and Apple will update policies - eventually.
These app developers are taking advantage of an unrelated function the cell phone to spam people.
Too bad greenify is not being maintained anymore
It really feels like apps should be required by App Store policy to separate out their notifications into "delivery channels": at least, one channel for urgent/timely notifications, and a separate channel for "something has changed, no need to check right now" notifications. Where users should then be able to configure the notification policies on each of an app's delivery channels separately.
Then, every type of notification an app can send (i.e. every string-template for a notification message) could be required to be pre-classified with the delivery channel it will use at app version release time — with the App Store review team rejecting app updates if the update, in their opinion, misclassifies the "proper" delivery channel for a given message-template.
I just realized that Uber and Tinder spam me with such marketing messages and I don't remember ever giving them consent for that.
But another somewhat related issue: apps that are allowed to ignore your audio settings. I have my sound muted pretty much all the time and inevitably apps I use that have ads auto play them usually with sound on at a high level. It's quite aggravating.
Ah yes this is one of my pet peeve. I have resorted to block those notifications too and forced to check the app periodically for any update if I'm waiting for something. Those bastards rely on people eventually tired of that and let ad notifications through but so far I still stand fast. Although it helps that I rarely buy online.
My solution to your problem is to just open the app, it defeats the purpose of notifications but I order rarely enough that it isn't a really big problem.
However just sending people straight to voicemail doesn't work in a surprisingly high number of cases - I had a voicemail from a person that was just "Hello, hello, hello". Like WTF. Explain why you were calling, thats the point of voicemail.
So it just took a few days of turning off junk notifications whenever I saw them to totally clean them up. I now only get the ones I want.
I would pay serious money for an ecosystem that promised no enshittification creep, but sadly that is not on the cards.
My attention is a valuable resource for me, and it is limited. So it should be bought.
We should make sending notifications billable and let users set price for sending notifications to them. And voila - problem solved!
Though how I am able to use the phone this way is not cool at all. I realized a long time ago that I am checking the phone all the time anyway and there's no way I would miss anything.
The worst is the apps where you do want notifications on, like your food delivery apps so you know when your food is at the door, but those companies take that as an invite to send you daily marketing notifications and it all feels like a breach of trust.