The options are “On” or “Off”. Please read the examples I provided for why that isn’t good enough.

I’ll even leave you with a third example: I can’t get shipping notifications about an online order I made without also opting into spam about sales and discounts. Apple could take a pro-user stance here and help us push back against scummy behavior, but they choose not to be helpful. They also happen to profit off of it, I’m sure that’s unrelated.

By “choose not to be helpful”, do you mean that they don’t use AI to detect spam notifications and distinguish them from useful notifications? That seems like quite a difficult engineering problem, though I’m sure their new AI could help.

There are many tools at their disposal, of which AI may be only a small one.

1) They could implement a “promotional” notification category the same way that they do “time sensitive” and let the user customize that the same way, or at least offer an opt-out.

2) Add a “report” button next to the disable notifications button.

3) Stop delivering notifications on behalf of apps that don’t correctly categorize promotional notifications.

4) Skip all this complexity and just ban developers that send spam. This is what their monopoly on app distribution is supposedly justified by: protecting users from malicious app developers.