And let's not forget focus modes... I have them that narrow greatly my default set of notifications, so I have a 3 tiers of notifications.

It's like the complaint I used to hear all the time: "Slack ruins work for me! OMG I can't work with constant interruptions!!" That is bewildering, because if that's how you feel, you haven't tuned your setup. Slack never interrupts me, yet I am response enough to slack messages. No one has ever complained about my response time. And I'm probably the most-messaged person on our Slack.

The withering cry of the software engineer "just tune your setup!" This is simply not a thing that people will do.

The defaults are so, so important. They are crucial. The vast majority of people rely on the defaults to be sane. The defaults should be sane.

How much time must everyone be asked to waste to “tune” a working set of applications to something reasonably sane for human beings.

Sure, what is sane for one human might not be for the next, but it’s not as if trends cannot be discerned.

How ridiculous would it be to be told “if you don’t want people constantly barging into your office, lock the door”?

And when I had an office, I closed (not locked) the door to signify I was in a focus mode. I don't get your point.

When I’m focused, I don’t hear it because it’s too subtle. But when I’m not concentrating on anything, it’s more noticeable and I don’t mind the distraction.

This might not work for everyone (“YMMV” and all), but I’ve personally found it a very effective yet simple solution.

I have no audible sounds from notifications. They don't go to my phone, with few exceptions. I get no popups. Yet, I am responsive. It was trivial to set up.

This is how taxis worked for decades before smartphones existed. You phoned for a taxi, then remained vaguely aware that it would arrive shortly.

The question is whether a single “it has arrived” notification is worth the surrounding noise: “driver accepted”, “driver is nearby”, “rate your driver”, “here’s 10% off your next ride”, and so on.

In most cases, it is not. The useful information is either already obvious (you can see the car outside) or you have re-opened the app to check where they are.

Operational and marketing notifications should never share the same permission. Until that is enforced at the OS level, I will treat them all as unnecessary spam.

My phone has been on DoNoDisturb since 2010 or so. Here's the reality: I don't check for any of those things. Delivery drivers can ring the door bell. If I'm very hungry I'll keep the app open and check where they are. I literally do not care to be notified about any of the things that apps want to notify me off.

Anyone who cares to reach me knows to ring the phone twice in case of emergency to get through DnD. Anyone else? The best time to call is text me. Or schedule a time.

As for Claude, the point of clankers is that they work in the background. The robot can wait, their infinite patience is a feature.

Manually polling multiple items as you go around your day is stealing valuable mental bandwidth that could be used in better things.

I both agree and disagree with you. I disabled notifications for everything and found myself refreshing email too often. But if I have the notifications, I can get disturbed too often which also takes mental bandwidth.

For me I found the best tactic was to selectively enable notifications (whatsapp for just one person), and delete (not silence) everything else - I don't have email on my phone now - the temptation to check it is more than the need to have it. As for things like PagerDuty, I have it send an SMS and phone me instead.

Hundred percent agree. I wouldn't support having notifications for everything enabled.

I find polling less disruptive because my phone or watch are almost always nearby. Being in control of when to get interrupted feels better than having stuff constantly pop up while you’re doing something.

Just holding my partner’s phone spikes my cortizol. You try to type 2 sentences and get 5 notifications for random other apps and messages popping up on screen in the meantime. Literally one notification every 10 seconds on average. It’s horrible

Which makes me wonder why you have notifications for your bank and Whatsapp enabled.

If I have an account, I know what transactions are coming out of it. I was the person who owned the account.

If I have someone's number, I know if I want to see messages from them. I was the person who gave them my number.

Seems really sill that you have notifications enabled for those apps. If you care about missing something, you'd just check them anyway.

What if you receive notification about transaction that you didnt make? :)

I have WhatsApp notifications enabled because it is the primary way people communicate where I live. If my elderly mother messages or calls me, it will most likely be through WhatsApp.

Both of those notifications contain genuinely important or time-sensitive information which may require action on my part.

That's the distinction between them. A person contacting me is fundamentally different from a brand attempting to engage me. Transaction alerts are fundamentally different from “your order is out for delivery”.

The criteria is not “did a thing happen”. It's whether the notification gives meaningful new information that is important or time-sensitive, and requires me to take action.

Most app notifications fail that test completely.

Seems like a useless observation in a world that has had smartphones for decades then, huh? The notification use here is a two way ping, communicating from the driver that they're here and to not needlessly waste your time looking around or "remain[ing] vaguely aware [they would] arrive shortly" and being inattentive, thereby wasting the drivers time and chance of profit. We're all glad you personally have a cute little value system that let's you frame your cute little acts of defiance as a war against big bad change, but no one here needs to defend to you why receiving a notification on an app needs to be helpful in a life-changing way for the feature to be considered useful. It's now considered useful for millions of people who arent you, so let's have a discussion about making it less distracting or better suited for tasks, instead of geriatric pining about the nostalgia of simpler times.

My neighborhood has a WhatsApp. I engage with it if I feel like it. Works great

Maybe she didn’t opt in, but she will never unsubscribe from anything.

Emails from every site she’s ever shopped at.

This too is frustrating. Spam is not allowed unless you have a "prior relationship".

But fuck me, that single toddler's bike I bought many years ago for my then toddler no longer qualifies as us having a relationship.

Also, websites are shady. If you put in a required email, they'll usually automatically check a little box for you that says "allow us to ruin your inbox?" How helpful of them.

And, I'm not even convinced that checkbox does anything.

The checkboxes seem to be a placebo. Sometimes there isn't one. Sometimes it doesn't do anything. Sometimes they say "updates on your order", which apparently also means future products you might want to buy a week after you receive your order. (Marketers' English seems like a foreign language to me).

People. Opt. In.

Stop conflating your preferences with other people’s.

Riddle me this, if a shady company not even headquartered in the UK sends you a newsletter you didn’t willingly opt in to, what happens to them?

Repeat until the emails stop.

I’m sorry but if you honestly think the number of users who receive marketing spam have expressed “informed consent” you’re fucking high. There is a multi-trillion dollar industry devoted to tricking people into opting into spam. Stop pretending these people are expressing any consent at all.

Same with websites like Youtube who don't understand a plain "no" but offer a fake choice between "yes, harvest all my data" and "ask me again later". That isn't consent, it's coercion.

2. because most of the time, any other option is bloody inconvenient

edit: downvote all you want. Fact remains that there is no way currently to block advertisement notifications and no disincentives for those who use them.

Works well.

On the flipside, I have an app that sends notifications. We don't abuse it or use it for promotions, and APNS and Google's version works perfectly fine for us.

But then everyone started doing it and Apple stopped enforcing the rule. It may still be in there somewhere as a "guideline."

In fact, Uber on Android does use these notification channels. I just have "All Promotions & Recommendation notifications" disabled, and then "Taking a ride" channel enabled.

I disagree. What the is the point of forcing everyone to use the Google Play Store (or whatever app store on iOS) if the store doesn't stop spammers?

People complain about Uber, but Lyft does the same shit. I got a promotional notification from Lyft and could not disable it without disabling the main notifications that tell me when drivers were arriving.

If app stores were useful instead of just rent-seeking, they would kick Lyft off until they stopped doing that.

Account > Settings > Accessibility > Communication Settings

It's the same reason Microsoft built functionality to let users in Europe have links open in their default browser instead of Edge but blocked that feature for the rest of the world.

it's a tradeoff. eliminating notification spam means behaving more synchronously when booking a taxi. i don't mind waiting outside for five minutes. especially if i'm not getting a random ping when i'm definitely not booking a taxi :shrugs:

Then next month, you create a new notification channel for your new promotional messages because too many people opted out of the old channels. You default that new channel to opt in, to make sure the user gets their chance to experience it and share in the delight you mean to share with them.

Presumably, you continue this until you have hundreds of such toggles and presumably some kind of dedicated Toggle Engineering Department that oversees them all. Nextdoor, Meta apps, LinkedIn, and countless others all appear to be competing for the most such toggles.

It's infuriating that the one thing the App Store monopoly could be useful for isn't even actually used in practice (if you're big enough, ofc, you and me get to eat shit if we try to evade App Store policy).

Then I got a replacement iPhone and reinstalled Instagram.app, and it defaulted to "show you notifications for everything we think you might be interested in" again, and I was too lazy to spend all that time relearning how to disable those notifications. I disabled the notifications entirely and now I open the app once a week or so to check in.

I had to do the same thing with Facebook years ago. Now I open it once a month to see who from high school got married in the last month and click the little "heart" icon and scroll until I get bored (~2 minutes). Can't trust Zuck with notifications.

So do I. Login on the web incognito.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04835

I used the setting and am not getting Uber ads (only Uber ride notifications).

You turn off more and more categories and they'll still find a reason.

Android has notification channels, but I'm not sure how widely it's used: https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/compose/notificatio...

The push notification UX is just beyond terrible and it just got worse over time as app developers tried abusing their super power of being able to interrupt the user at will and Apple and Google tried to get on top of that. The net result is something that's very mediocre for the handful of valid uses I have left for notifications. My list is similar to yours. Things like bank approvals, 2FA stuff, etc. are useful mainly as deeplinks into apps. But other than that, it's just not worth dropping whatever I'm doing and staring at my phone.

The most used apps on my Android phone (older Google pixel model) are Firefox and gmail and just a handful of other things. As a notification channel, my email inbox is actually far more useful than mobile push notifications. They are more actionable and informative. And I can individually unsubscribe them or filter them out and easily find them back. Most apps can do both and that makes the push notifications inferior and redundant.

There’s also substantially more filtering happening in the inbox which is mostly useful from a user perspective.

Yahoo literally wrote a paper more than a decade ago showing how they can model predictive causal chains for emails they expect you to receive, as an example.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2740908.2741694

At this point, I'm pretty much in some form of DND at all times. I have a very small list of people that I allow the device to notify me at any time for calls/messages. Everyone else gets silenced and I'll get back to them when I choose. All other apps have notifications disabled and I'm constantly nagged about it when using those apps

Who is he kidding? The vast majority of apps have absolutely proven they can't be trusted to respect your attention. From my perspective, the more roadblocks the platforms put between unnecessary notifications and my phone, the better. And I don't think Apple or Google are some sort of heroes here, but I do believe their incentives better align with mine than the marketing department of some app I was forced to download because I bought a ticket once or something like that.

Now a few apps have started sending notifications through WhatsApp because they have my phone number. e.g. Amazon

Should be, but not always. There are plenty of apps that still mix marketing and functional notification.

Hell, even Apple does this, especially on new devices.

[Settings]: Log in to your iCloud account to sync data.

Three minutes later…

[Settings]: You qualify for three free months of Apple Music!

What glorious universe do you live in where email is respected enough to have transactions separate from marketing, and that this is not only required by law but also enforced?

(I decided to look it up, here's the UK rules: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/direct-marketing-and-pr... . It looks like it is allowed to be opt-out if you buy something from them, which I do dislike, but there are rules and the ICO does have teeth)

In the past, yeah. But today? Never.

Have you encountered a "marketing email" that you didn't sign up for? That's called phishing.

Have you clicked on links in phishing emails? That's called getting pwned.

Legal requirements are useless without enforcement.

I am just looking for a fucking taxi.

Are there any VCs looking to give away a few billion dollars to disrupt the ossified, wasteful, poor customer experience taxi app market?

Waymo are rolling out, slowly. No one'll be in a real position to compete against them.

It would be better if they were totally opt-in of course (1), but that's not bloody likely to happen.

(1) As in off by default with no questions.

Heavy use of Scheduled Summaries does also lead to me wondering why there isn't a "default notifications to Ask/On/Scheduled Summaries/Off" global setting, though I would want that choice between Scheduled and Off at least.

Except F-Droid. I trust their moderation enough to allow auto updates.

You are a two factor app. I should never be in a situation where there is an unexpected login I need to verify.

Isn't that kind of the point? If someone else is trying to login somewhere with your credentials, your two factor will ping up?

I guess you can make the argument that you are then made aware of login attempts, but that feels more like something the host service should control.

Because to get that far they entered your password? Which you might like to change?

You did mention: "You are a two factor app."

If they've got past your first factor, you might want to know.

1. Introduce passwords

2. Introduce email-based reset flow

3. Introduce 2FA (optional)

4. Someone says "take the password reset flow, trigger it automatically when a user tries to log in and has only given their email, hide the password field during login, and after the email is validated drop the user back to their previous journey instead of having them set a new password"

5. You see #4 as #3 failing, but when #3 was never applied it's not quite that. Aside: making #3 mandatory would be smart.

This has been going on since at least 2006.

Startups will "growth hack" by buying e-mail lists and feeding them into their password recovery tools.

A certain percentage of people will then follow the links and end up creating a new account on a service they had no interest in that now has their confirmed contact information, a new user, and a plausible reason to bombard them with marketing email.

The account was supposedly registered for an organization whose name was somewhat similar to mine, so I thought somebody fat-fingered their coworker's email (the initial email was an invitation to create an account and join the org), but it might have very well been the tactic you described.

If there's a chat app I installed 3 years ago, with no intention of giving it camera access, and I suddenly need to use that app for a video call, I don't want to be stuck debugging broken camera issues for two hours. I'd much rather have the app tell me that it doesn't have camera access.

I can actually confess that this hit me. Almost nothing on my phone has permission to use my camera, including my web browser (why???). I assume this was done in a fit of pique upon discovering that the setting even existed.

Roll on (god knows how many years later) and I cannot get into the gym with the link I was emailed to have my browser read a QR because my browser is just a grey screen. It was only when the member of staff suggested permissions that I realised what was going on.

I'm the problem, it's me

Unfortunately Google isn't really exposing this to users, so you need something like App Ops or adb to set it up.

There’s a similar thing going on with emails. Dozens of services ”decide” that you need to update your email address, because ”they can’t reach you”. Many of them even stop sending you emails you explicitly subscribed to, perhaps to maintain an archive, ”because you don’t seem to open them”.

No, dear Linkedin and others, you’re reaching me just fine, and it’s none of your business whether, when and where I open them. Maybe I just read my emails offline and strip your tracking links (and avoid clicking on links in emails in general).

Inexplicably LinkedIn’s UX for changing the old email address, the one they cannot reach you at (!), to a new email address, starts with confirming your current email address (THE ONE THEY CANNOT REACH YOU AT). Brilliant.

On the one hand it helps avoid "permissions fatigue" that the user just has the one permission to manage ("enable notifications"), but on the other hand it does lead to these questions about why an entire class of applications (banking apps and security apps) whose role should be mostly never to send notifications (because that can be a FUD/fear/fraud vector) need notifications enabled to work securely.

I know lots of apps behave badly when it comes to notifications but I'd still prefer if the apps controlled the level of notifications they sent. I could, of course, reduce that client-side, but I don't see why I'd want Google or Apple or any other intermediary see or control the notifications.

If an app behaves inappropriately, I could uninstall it. If a gatekeeper like Google or Apple prevent an app from sending me notifications, I'd have to change my OS, usually my hardware, too.

Current users might be just that. I agree. But those same users decided to download dozens of hundreds of apps. They use each app much more than it would take for them to go to the settings (if such good settings exist) and take care of what is allowed and what isn't. It's their responsibility.

We've let users be treated as infants far too long. That leads to centralized decisions on behalf of these users, for their own good. Which leads to users being more and more negligent in their duty to govern their own digital selves. It's a vicious cycle.

Can we break it just by changing the way users manage their notifications? Likely no, sadly. We need a complete overhaul of personal digital responsibility. We need to remove (almost?) all safeguards and nanny-state (nanny-corp?) treatments the users get. Let them get hacked, let them lose money, let their digital lives, money, identities completely go to shit. They will recover but they'll have learned a valuable lesson - the computer in their pockets is their own computer, the apps they install could be malicious, the consequences are not artificially removed. I think the users will learn after a a while.

We don't install guards to prevent someone from poking into the outlets with a fork. We do it for small children. We don't put guardrails everywhere. If you're not careful where you go, you might fall or get hit by a car. Why is the digital realm so different? We've had computers for a while now, it's time to take responsibility for ourselves.

Otherwise we'll always treat users as infants or sheep or retards or whatever you wanna call it. That means making our safety and security someone else's problem, but that also means letting go of any agency we have. Letting others control our lives. And our digital lives are becoming a bigger part of our lives as times goes on.

I upvoted your comment, btw. You are right that now centralized solutions are better, but later that might change and we'll have no recourse. "We" as a people, not individuals.

We absolutely do, and they've been mandatory for a while. https://www.electricallicenserenewal.com/Electrical-Continui...

Unrelated to that specific regulation, the US National Electric Code is made by a non-profit who, until 2016, didn't even make copies of the code freely available. That's crazy to me. What's also crazy is how the 2023 version I checked just now has 918 pages of dense regulations. Am I really supposed to believe all that is necessary?

Align better for now. It will get enshittified.

I try very hard to avoid installing apps specific to a particular business or organisation. So far I have only had to install a government app and some from banks. Even those are avoidable (but it would be very inconvenient to do so).

I'd rather choose better software than let Google/Apple decide what software running on my device is allowed to do.

Conferences are great examples. You do want to submit your paper and go to a conference. To do that, they need your email address(understandable). That email ends up on dozens of email lists run by people who are doing "outreach" or something of the sort.

Of course you could describe almost all of the internet that way.

Suppose you want delivery notifications for your packages. The seller, by contrast, wants to spam you with marketing.

If getting the notifications requires you to install their app, they're going to shovel any spam into it that they can, and then they're writing the code that runs on your device. Whereas if the software on your device is controlled by you and the notifications are received using a standard protocol, you (or someone like uBlock) can create filters to only show the notifications you actually want and discard the spam.

But for that to actually work you need the software running on the client to be under the control of the user independent of which device or service they're using, and subject to competitive pressure. Otherwise the platform uses is as a means for lock-in and then filters your notifications in the ways that benefit them rather than you, or just does a lazy job because they know you've been deprived of having a lot of other alternatives.

In other words, you need the user of the software to pay for it's development. Since that won't happen ...

Imagine you're a shipping company and lock yourself into a parcel tracking protocol. You then decide to offer the innovative feature of parcel lockers, which need a code (or an action on your device) to open. How are you going to make the thousands of weird homebrew clients that people are using on their jailbroken Nintendo Switches or whatever to behave?

The service doesn't have to write every implementation, they just have to document a stable API and not actively impede third party code.

I used the Southwest Airlines app recently and allowed notifications so that I could find out about things like delays and gate changes (both of which happened on my trip). Less than a week later I'm getting ads for travel "deals" pushed as notifications.

Unsurprisingly, it was difficult to find the notification setting, which was on their website, not even in the app.

Take your phones back. Life is immensely better these days.

Want to continue a 300 message thread that I've been responding to? You're listed as my emergency contact, and called multiple times? Fuck right off. Straight to spam.

It's almost enough to get me to carry a second dumb phone or grapheneos device just so I can text and receive phone calls.

No, I don’t want ads, but I do want delivery updates from UPS/FedEx, breaking news for high impact stories, and I even want notifications for my favorite YouTube subscriptions.

Some people consider notifications interruptions but I really don’t. With my phone always on silent they’re all quite ignorable.

On the rare times I use an app like uber eats, I uninstall it directly after because the app sends multiple adverts a day through the notifications. I want a notification purely to tell me the driver is almost here. And nothing else.

(I'm reminded of this every time a client want "WhatsApp support" in their (commercial) app, so they can "communicate with customers".)

But equally every user will have a different subset of apps they want notifications for.

For example shift workers need to know when they've been allocated a shift. Or when a shift has opened up (because someone scheduled failed to arrive etc.) One group of users consider this really important, another group of users treat it as spam.

But, per the rule above, unfortunately "useful notifications" can easily be subverted by marketing notifications. Yes I want to know my delivery driver is outside, no I don't want to know that you're running a special this week.

Unfortunately there's no way to solve this problem technically. Bad actors can (and definitely do) behave badly. But ultimately the system should work for "good citizens". In other words, the user should ultimately determine what they want to see of not. And if an app has "notifications on or off" as the only option then the user should ultimately determine that setting. Not Google. Not Apple.

Building society around the lowest-common-denominator just ends up sucking for everyone. We should actively promote good behavior, while allowing bad behavior to be punished. Not just banning everything "because it might be bad".

With an app configured to do notifications like this, no banner shows up at the time the app's notifications are delivered; and these notifications don't even show up visibly on the lock screen. You only see this type of notification if you choose to actively scroll down past the "timely" notifications that do get delivered onto your lock screen, to "catch up" on all your notifications.

Basically, these notifications are relegated to an "email inbox" that you can check or not check as you like. But unlike your email inbox, you can go "inbox zero" on your notification "inbox" whenever you like without worry, since notifications (unlike email) are inherently prohibited from being a critical path in an app workflow.

The marginal cost of each notification is so low that companies simply spam users nonstop, and their A/B tests shows that the revenue is increasing. What's being lost though is that we're getting more and more agitated with these brands and their uncapped malicious behaviors. This is also true with their UI and UX as well, they keep adding banners with incredibly small close buttons, because someone will continue with the shopping after accidently missing the tiny button, and that's an added sale, who cares about 99% of users who are fuming with dissatisfaction, what are they going to throw away their $200-300 smart home device because companies abuse them?

I also don't use Siri either beyond setting timers and lights in home and every application is also excluded from being "suggested". Apple for 14 years didn't bother to add support for Polish so it basically remains useless.

So I would say: only humans can send me notifications. That includes me in the case of 2FA. But no machine ever, for any reason.

As for Whatsapp, maybe you're not in enough group chats that you still allow notifications...

I have broadly the same list as you do, but stuff like WhatsApp, Messenger, and other "non primary" communications platforms have silent notifications in the sense that they're not allowed on the lock screen or Home Screen. They simply display a notification counter.

Stuff I care about that I can't do anything about "right now" are allowed on the lock screen but quietly. That includes messages from the kids schools. Most is not even that important, like field trips "next week", but once in a while there's an "important" message I need to deal with.

I have MouseTimer that is an alarm that is nice to show to kids when they must wait or do something for 10 or 20 minutes. It should be able to ring and sometimes show notifications.

On my work I also disabled all notifications except for the calendar. Even slack message our main tool for communication is not allowed to send notifications. It is almost a productivity hack :P

That said, my view is now (not novel, or unique) that I am not the customer in so many cases. Any app or platform with the slightest hint of an advertising end-game restructures my usage as the product.

The customer is instead the sender (or advertiser). So, I can't expect ideal app behavior and usage based on my intentions because I'm sold (as the product) rather than the other way around.

Maybe a cynical view, and there are exceptions, but don't think I'm far off.

I don't get what you guys are doing to be so bothered by notifications. I get them on my wirst and even then it isn't enough to take away mental bandwidth.

Uber is a notorious example. I do genuinely want Uber notifications for when I use Uber. I do not care about whatever promotion it pushes at me.

> Phone, Messages, Whatsapp, Apple Health, [brand] bank.

Anyone else annoyed by the fact that you can set up do-no-disturb, with exceptions for certain phone numbers, but it doesn't work for apps like WhatsApp?

I also stopped doing store loyalty cards about 7 years ago and it's been fantastic. I actually get a lot less junk mail and spam/"legit" marketing emails. I don't have a gob of cards to sort through.

Corporations should not speak unless spoken to.

Naval Ravikant said this years ago and it stuck with me. Taking a page from your book, I have 0 notifications. I practice notification 0 and have done it for about a half decade now, and it's absolutely liberating and freeing. I found I needed to remove the apps from my phone Home Screen to feel this, as otherwise even their icon presence when opening my phone triggers dopamine loops.

When I need to be pinged, I use boundaries and expectations set with those who could interrupt what I'm doing with something important enough. Those people get to know where I'm at, how to reach me, etc and mostly what I do to help them is set them as contacts so my phone lets their calls through beyond voicemail, and I have physical locations accessible to them + times through the day where I'll check in.