Just piling on here: Snapchat is the absolute worst.

It's stunning to me that Google let's them get away with pushing ads through notifications.

Even Google "can't" follow their own rules, and mix transactional and marketing notifications in same channels.

Android’s notification channels API is clunky, and it’s a completely useless OS feature when there’s zero real spam enforcement at the Play Store level.

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 just want to add that a "report spam notification" feature would be a godsend and is the single best idea I've heard this month. It would change the attention economy entirely! At least until app developers began running bot farms to report each other's apps and poison the models

Maybe they could use the click-to-dismiss ratio as a spam signal? Or even speed-to-dismiss (people probably tend to dismiss spam notifications more quickly).

Maybe, but I think playing with meta-metrics is a dangerous game. I know plenty of people that just let notifications pile on. Some people have weird flows — e.g. see notification, don’t interact with it directly, then manually navigate to and enter the app that notified.

I really just think individual notifications (not apps) just need an explicit “this is spam” report button.

> e.g. see notification, don’t interact with it directly, then manually navigate to and enter the app that notified.

I do that sometimes. Not that it matters, because rarely any notification seems to deep-link into an app these days.

> it's a communication app so you want the notifications on

That doesn't follow, IMO. I have tons of communication platforms that aren't allowed to notify.

Well for college kids and young people you need to know if an event is being created or you're being invited somewhere. I don't want to check my phone every 30 minute throughout the day and nobody around me is rigid enough to plan everything days in advance. Sometimes you wanna go on an impromptu road trip or to a party or maybe there's a test you didn't know about and the study group is organizing a session. Maybe you just wanna be a part of the conversion when you're friend group starts taking instead of always pitching in hours later.

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.

It may surprise you, but people with kids or a mortgage also go to parties and organise events.

I have Slack and MS Outlook on my phone for work, which are both communication apps, but notifications are muted.