They do. They call them "time sensitive" notifications. You can use the "Focus" feature to delay less important types of notifications into a big batch at a specified time.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212608

It's been asking me about these and from what it tells me on my phone I don't understand what they are getting at.

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"

On android, each app's notifications are categorized. For, say, Uber, I can enable the obvious useful notifications and can disable promotional notifications. Presumably Google penalizes ignoring or abusing this system.

Hahahahaha - sorry, the mere suggestion that Google cares enough about this to "penalize" anyone who ignores this system is actually really funny to me. No, of course they don't do any such thing. The system is entirely and completely optional, and developers have long ago realized that actually using it is to their own detriment, because users will just block the marketing notifications but leave the important ones, so they just bundle everything together. I have actually messaged several developers of some of the apps I use if they can fix this exact thing and the response has always been "sorry we don't have the technical ability to do this" which is obviously complete nonsense. But no, there isn't any penalty for not doing this from google.

Huh. It really worked well for me so far. Interesting.

You're lucky. I found that even Google doesn't respect their own categories, and happily bucket useful information together with spam.

Is it really that surprising to you that something Google has created works better than something Apple has created for a specific narrow problem?

These are all trillion dollar companies, your allegiance is wasted.

....my "allegiance" if you want to call it that is entirely to Google, so I don't understand your point? Did you somehow get from my point that I'm an iOS user???

>>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?

The only android app I've ever seen with real categories is MS Teams.

Of course changing any setting on Teams has catastrophic unpredictable effects on it... But at least they tried.

You can't, tho, because no major apps actually separate the promotional notifications.

And for the bad applications you can use FilterBox (paid app), that allows you to regex them and automate them in different ways.

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.

> 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"

IIUC it is up to the app developer to tag the notifications they generate as time sensitive (or not) for iOS

> how does it differentiate

Probably through a pinky promise from the developers to call the right APIs.

Another piece is that all “time sensitive” notifications come with a button underneath to not let that app send time sensitive notifications anymore

Probably. And then I would expect the app store review process to check.

There's no way to flag spam / marketing. Uber for example occasionally sends marketing. But you can't really disable notifications. Instead, they (large companies) should just pay x cent per notification to Apple (not the user, because that would be seen as credit, eliminating the purpose)

That might work but what if the value of the spam notification is greater than Apples fee? Then it will carry on.

Flag more notifications as spam, which would increase the fee for that app.

As long as they get flagged, they’d need to pay more and more.

I only install Uber when I want to catch an Uber. Helps with notifications, tracking, and avoids impulse usage.

Yeah this. I uninstall it when I'm done or it starts bugging the fuck out of me.

Sometimes I think "should I install it" before getting one and get public transport or get on my bike instead.

Can you please explain why it would be preferable to have large companies paying x cents per notification to Apple, and not to users?

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?

So long as spam legislation applies to these notifications¹, you don’t need to: in theory you just report it to the relevant enforcement body, and they get fined heavily until they do something about it (which, under most sets of spam legislation, will start by requiring that these sorts of messages be opt-in only).

—⁂—

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.

Ho man. Works so well for email and phone calls huh?

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.

I think I average around one illegal spam email or phone call from Australian companies per year. I will always respond to them, though I don’t think I’ve ever actually got any to acknowledge the bald illegality of their action, and normally I will report them to ACMA.

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.

It’s who is in control, who bears the cost/gets hit with the bad behavior, and who is what level of desperate.

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.

Apple would be gaining so much goodwill and transforming the industry if they asked for feedback on notifications, and trained an ML system to decide which one to show.

>An ML system

Or... a float?

Yeah, simple models work too.

It used to be against App Store TOS to send marketing notifications full stop.

Apple isn't interested in fixing this, they allowed it to happen in the first place.

They can't fix it because governments would consider it anti-competitive. Same reason the browser can't come with an adblocker.

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.

Apple has a great feature called "Notification Summaries". More urgent notifications are shown immediately, but notifications from apps of your choosing are all bundled together into two daily summaries.