I run my phone on DND all day, everyday and block notifications from almost all apps. The amount of garbage we have vying for our attention on an hourly basis is overwhelming sometimes.
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.
It is a breach of trust. I give apps access to my immediate attention so they can notify me of things that need my attention. Not for telling me about their new features or some crappy partner deal.
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.
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.
I have an iOS device, so can’t speak for Google, but I suspect that’s what Apple has been _trying_ to do.
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.
Well, Apple is trying a 'do as I say, not as I do' approach, which isn't exactly working.
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)
Slightly off topic but another thing I noticed that’s infuriating me, is that podcast are now injected with local ads. I’m. It sure how they’re getting location data since iOS has extremely tight and secure authorizations for location access (even within their own internal processes). How can I be offered the ability to control whether Compass Calibration or Apple Pay Merchant verification get to use my location but not podcast advertisements??
I use Glasswire (Android) and block apps from accesing the internet, when not using them (e.g. Uber).
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.
Not illegal, from what I've heard — someone read the small print of their mortgage agreement, modified it, signed it, the bank person signed the modified agreement, the bank sent junk mail, he pointed out this meant the bank was in breach of contract and given how he'd modified it that he was apparently theoretically entitled to write off the remaining debt.
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?)
In Android/Google land, notifications have self declared categories.
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.
> If you have a mechanism for “only the most essential notifications”, then they simply mark all their notifications as “essential” (looking at you Uber)
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”?
This is not a problem from their perspective - it is a revenue centre.
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.
Google has this. You can make notification types as silent or normal or priority. Notifications from the same app have groupings of what type of notifications they will send. And you pick which ones you want to be notified about.
Doesn’t this rely on the app developer maintaining the correct labeling of each category? An unethical developer would just mix advertisements into all notification category, while an ethical developer wouldn’t be sending the spurious notifications in the first place.
This is the answer. Money talks, so give your money to businesses that earn it.
"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 stated preference is things like healthy food, paying as opposed to ads (not being the product), and no notifications.
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.
It's a common issue in America. The Game book basically already discussed this with dating. That stated preferences are total junk for significant portions of humanity. They say they want "idea" but really want, "pretend to believe in 'idea', while acting the horrible way you actually respond to."
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.
Active interventions gave us war on drugs with hundreds of thousands of civilians dead (or rather millions if you count things like oxycontin -> fentanyl and other similar side effects), tens if not hundreds of millions of lives fucked up, and seeing a superpower losing a war with... some chemicals. No thank you
So does Uber (+ eats); I don’t want deals or vouchers, I don’t want to sign up to your subscription service, I only want to know when the car is arriving.
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.
Yes, and websites know that we don't want video advertisements playing everywhere on the screen, but it doesn't matter because we're the product, not the customer.
I use a screenshot of the payment barcode from the Starbucks app when I’m in the store to pay. I do not want it on my phone. It seems to be constantly bombarding my wife’s phone with trivial prompts and notifications.
Yep, I've mostly given up on the one strike rule and gone to a "don't install any phone app unless absolutely necessary" rule. Much of the time I can avoid the app by either using their web site, or just forgoing whatever functionality the app provides. Airline apps, which can be useful during a trip, get installed when the trip begins and uninstalled as soon as the trip is over.
The entire purpose of getting you to install a mobile phone app is to push marketing notifications at you in a way that forces you to interact with them, if only to individually dismiss them. Whatever it is /you/ want to do with the app is incidental to this, and only of any concern to the extent that it helps convince you to install the app.
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.
> The entire purpose of getting you to install a mobile phone app is to push marketing notifications at you
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.
> For this reason I have a one strike policy for apps. One marketing notification and permissions are revoked.
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.
I really wish Google would enforce proper categorization. Risking missing something on any (somewhat) important app because of the occasional marketing notification seems not worth it to me.
I think Shell, the gas station chain, has a notification category on android as "Pump updates" which gives silly pump statuses, but they started sending credit card offers under Pump updates. Jackasses.
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)
I have the habit of force stopping any questionable application (uber) as soon as I stop using it. That and limiting permissions to when the app is actually open.
I have something similar. I have one strike and I check for an app specific notification.
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.
Bumble is really similar and disgusting. By default, notifications are enabled for both messages (which are a pretty good thing to have notifications turned on for) and once or twice a day Peak Cringe marketing push notifications. They have the ability to turn off specific kinds of notifications, but one of the categories is "The Good Stuff: Turning these off means you'll miss out on our most exciting pushes of all!" and I'm not unconvinced that this is actually their daily CTAs to get you back into the app, because none of the other categories cover those.
Instagram for me. I don't use it much but have a few friends who message through it, or at least send some memes. If I enable notifications for that, I get daily notifications that someone I might know has joined Instagram, someone I know posted to their story... It's about 1:4 real notifications vs "Please spend more time on our app"
As soon as I get to a point where I would normally get zero notifications from FB/IG, they invent a new way to give me a notification. Always.
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.
Another disgusting thing they do is push promo notifications with the title “1 new match?” where the question mark is the only difference from an actual app notification.
Tinder gets around this by sending fake "You have a new like" or "You have a new match" message nearly daily. You open the app and have neither. I turned off all notifications except new messages to get rid of this.
Well, you can turn everything off except messages so I don't see it as that big of a deal. I don't install many apps on my phone so going into the app settings and turning off notifications isn't a big deal.
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.
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.
....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?
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
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
Uber and Lyft do this too. They’re taking a page from the LinkedIn playbook and creating new categories of notifications, which you then have to hunt down and disable. There isn’t one unified settings area for all notifications, which makes this extra tricky.
> There isn’t one unified settings area for all notifications, which makes this extra tricky.
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.
Yeah I think iOS has some level of granularity, like "time-sensitive" versus other notifications, but you can't disable marketing versus ride-related notifications in one predictable place (you have to hunt through the app's privacy settings, IIRC, to find at least some of them). I wish Apple would provide a per-app setting that controlled necessary versus unnecessary notifications.
Another abuse of the rules that would get any small developer banned from the app store with no ability to do a human appeal, while the giants are allowed to break as many rules as they want. (Except trying to dodge Apple's percentage take on in app purchases).
Snapchat is like this, it's a communication app so you want the notifications on, but they flood it with marketing. And they refuse to use Android's notification "channels" to segment their notifications. Google should start enforcing that in their Play Store reviews.
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.
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.
I once tried disabling every notification at the app level, but it was hopeless. After going DND 24/7, my quality of life has measurably improved. I'd never go back.
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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.
One issue is that things don't stay DND or blocked. All the apps update individually, and also every few months the vendor publishes a new OS update with yet more enshittification to turn off (where you even can! Search for how to turn off "at a glance" to see a tide of consumer misery and frustration. The vendor has important awesome things they want to do with your device, and only occasionally do those happen to align with the boring unimportant everyday activities /you/ want to use your device for.)
I would pay serious money for an ecosystem that promised no enshittification creep, but sadly that is not on the cards.
Huh, strange, is this specific to Android? Because my DND mode stays DND throughout updates, except for the contacts and apps I've already marked as the exceptions. I don't think I've ever had the problem of unwanted notifications.
> 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.
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.
I was thinking of picking up the new Pixel Watch as I miss calls and notifications all the time and I thought it might reduce my phone time. But I'm also frustrated I receive too much marketing spam on apps in which I can't disable notifications. The last thing I want is those same notifications spamming my watch. Phone vendors keep releasing features that are useless to me when it seems we're all in agreement the notification spam is out of control. The vendor that gives us some way to mark notifications as spam will actually give me a reason to switch.
> 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
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.
In the EU we had the option to opt out of marketing messaging when signing up for services for a long time. Some services (mainly telco's) punish you with an extra fee for doing that, but it's still worth it.
I just realized that Uber and Tinder spam me with such marketing messages and I don't remember ever giving them consent for that.
I use Uber irregularly (when I travel). Every one of those notifications has resulted in me uninstalling the app as it reminds me I still have it on my phone since the last time I travelled.
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.
I’m pretty sure this violates Apple’s App Store policies, but they seem to not care. Apple even sometimes abuses their notifications to promote new App Store releases and other Apple services.
Many have said it’s easy to disable non essential push notifications. I find it discussing that even when doing that, companies add new categories and have a default-opt-in.
This is entirely due to people not testing the impact of too many marketing notifications on whether people keep their notifications on—partially because Apple doesn’t share that information with developers, so they have to guess based on who comes from a notification with UTM tags.
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.
I, too, have been running my phone on DND as of late and it’s been pretty great. My wife disagrees :). I’m pretty sure iOS focus modes would allow me to configure notifications from my wife to come through while silencing the others but I’ll wait til she tells me :).
It’s fairly strightforward - if you swipe down from the top right and turn on DND there are 3 dots next to it and you can customise it. In there you can put a list of people that you want notifications from.
Between the focus modes and general notification settings you can get things pretty quieted down.
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 hate all delivery apps that don't use whatever that puts the persistent thing on your iphone screen. It was made for that, dammit.
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.
Yeah, delivery apps suck in this regard and iOS should really do more to help. I would love a push notification option to the effect of “only if I’ve used the app in the last 2 hours”.
All my notifications are turned off except voice calls (including on whatsapp and telegram) because I want to be woken up if there's a family emergency.
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.
Amazon Music lets you turn off notifications but has blocking modal advertisements for upgrades or whatever (so like when you go in to start a playlist it makes you dismiss an advertisement first).
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.
On android (and maybe iOS?) apps define seperate notification channels for each category, and you can turn off specific channels quickly by sliding over on the notification in OxygenOS. Most apps I've seen have specific channels for marketing including food delivery apps.
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 argue an even worse situation are apps like Wyze camera that really need notifications enabled to alert you to camera movement, doorbell usage or other pressing events.
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.
I’ve used Wyze for a few years and get notifications of all my video events, but no marketing pushes. I think I had to set a setting but I am pretty happy with their pushes and are one of the few apps I leave on.
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.
This is the primary reason I root and install greenify. To prevent these spammy apps, that I sometimes use, from running in the background and sending notifications. Unless I open the app in the forground specifically.
It's a shame that a basic spam filter can't be inserted between the app and the OS notifications. That was the good thing about email, you could have filters sit between the app and your inbox.
Uber eats started doing that and it’s infuriating because you need the realtime notices for the app but then they send you non stop promos and make you jump through hoops to disable the marketing ones.
It's offensive how often postmates asks to enable notifications from the software side of things. For a while, it would ask after almost every interaction, which made the app somewhat unusable.
I set my phone on DND when I go to bed. The only notifications I let through the DND are my security cameras (internal), and 2 phone numbers, my sister, and my business partner.
Android, I think, does something this automatically. At least, I don't hear it all night, and when I go to check in the morning I get bombarded with notifications that seemed to have occured overnight.
I tried that, but now windows 11 keeps getting micro updates at work and the advertisements in the start menu are always enabled and telling me about wonderful sales.
The strongest solution to this is to use the web sites instead of the apps. I only have a few apps I really need: all the Google apps, Strava, Garmin Connect, micromobility apps for bike and scooter share, and that's it. Everything else is a website. And none of these apps are allowed to notify. The only notifications I ever get are Apple Pay and Messages. I don't even let the voicemail app (Google Fi) notify because what kind of jerk leaves a voicemail?
Everybody is. I'm strongly of the opinion that all this 'needy tech' is a net negative and I try hard to keep it out of my life. But some of it, mostly associated with my kids schooling, is very hard to avoid. 10 emails per week about some school portal with 'an important message' (which you need to separately logged into, of course the message is so important that it can't be entrusted to mere email, even though the account recovery does use that same email) that ends up being nonsense but you're not able to block it because one day an actually important message might show up.
Tech should serve us, but meanwhile instead of having terminals to the internet we are now the terminals to the internet. Push notifications and all manner of intrusive interaction have become the norm, not the exception that they should be.
It should, but it's becoming more and more obvious that it won't and can't. Literally every economic incentive it pushing towards 1) making it crappier until it's just good enough to buy, 2) maximally exploiting its users.
The market won't save us, because a competitor who tries to gain market-share by not doing that crap will eventually turn around and join in the fun, once it's in their interest.
Mobile internet may end up as being a giant mistake. It opens up an entire superhighway of enshittification, makes us more dependent on centralized control, and doesn't provide a much better communication experience that the telephone network.
No need for such pessimism - what can, and will change how things work is the consumer, being smart enough to demand better. See the other comments here, there is a market for responsible sustainable and boundary-respecting products. It is just a matter of time IMHO, until the majority of people have enough.
Imagine the food industry 20 years back. It looked like the end of the world - literal poison everywhere you look. Your arguments back then would never foresee today's organic food hype and vegetables craze.
> No need for such pessimism - what can, and will change how things work is the consumer, being smart enough to demand better. See the other comments here, there is a market for responsible sustainable and boundary-respecting products. It is just a matter of time IMHO, until the majority of people have enough.
I'll believe it when I see it. But it's not looking good. Subscription streaming was supposed to be like that: you pay to get a "responsible sustainable and boundary-respecting products." But it turns out showing people ads makes more money, so those products are pushing users in that direction.
> Imagine the food industry 20 years back. It looked like the end of the world - literal poison everywhere you look. Your arguments back then would never foresee today's organic food hype and vegetables craze.
Isn't that mainly an affluent consumer thing? And often subject to lies and nonsense?
I expect the digital equivalent to be something like Google's doing: changing their products to ostensibly "protect" user privacy, but in reality giving all the data to Google and locking out its competitors.
>The market won't save us, because a competitor who tries to gain market-share by not doing that crap will eventually turn around and join in the fun, once it's in their interest.
Doesn't this imply, though, that there is some kind of market force which would allow such a competitor who isn't doing that to grab market share in the first place? What happens to that market share when the competitor eventually decides to change their trajectory - does it just disappear?
> But some of it, mostly associated with my kids schooling, is very hard to avoid. 10 emails per week about some school portal with 'an important message' that ends up being nonsense but you're not able to block it because one day an actually important message might show up.
> Tech should serve us
This problem isn't really the tech, it's the people behind these messages. Complain to them. You shouldn't be getting "OMFG IMPORTANT MESSAGE" alerts that, when you click on them say "LOL PTA meeting is this Thursday, and we need someone to bring coffee." That decision is being made by a person who you should be able to find and share your concern with.
> That decision is being made by a person who you should be able to find and share your concern with.
Good point, and it generalizes to pretty much all the social problems "created by" tech. The technology is fine. Behind each misuse is a person or a group that commissioned said tech, and/or is applying it in malicious ways. Focusing on ills of technology, while ignoring the people wielding it for wrong, is just a distraction.
> Behind each misuse is a person or a group that commissioned said tech
How many cases of misuse implicates a structural flaw in a larger system? It's absurd to point the finger, over and over, at this or that "malicious" person. It's exhausting! They somehow keep getting incentivized to appear.
Yes, but! People, not systems, are the moral actors. And yes, while a lot of problems are more or less systemic, in many cases those systems have control levers that happen to be in the reach of a small number of people. Finally, pointing the fingers and creating ethical, social and legal pressure for people closest to control levers, is a form of systemic response too - it's adding a back flow to form a feedback loop.
Rejecting "technology" is, IMHO, a perfectly rational response to the typical layers of consultants, sales teams, and general lack of knowledge of the fundamentals of tech that result in the isses described above. You can't win.
I would like to get journalists to see things my way, so we'd get a little less "oh look at the bad tech" and a little more of "look at the C-suite of companies X, Y and Z employing tech for bad" kind of articles, but I get the feeling that I won't get through to them either. Something about things your salary depends on not understanding, etc.
“I don’t use email anymore. I need you to communicate any important information about my child’s education to me through other means. Would you rather send notices home with my child or call my home phone?”
Or some variant thereof. “I reviewed the privacy policy and have serious concerns, no longer agree with the terms of use and cannot use this platform.” (I’m sure if you go read it it won’t even be a lie; all the ones I’ve seen have been awful.) Or “My phone broke and I can’t afford a new one so I can’t check my email.” Or “I’ve had a religious revelation and will no longer be making use of any technology created after 1970.”
Once someone has to make an active decision to contact you instead of just mass-spamming the entire school with a button press I guarantee nobody goes “Yeah, I really should call jacquesm and ask if he can bring coffee to the PTA meeting.”
You might be the first person to ask for an accommodation but it doesn’t mean that it can’t be done, just that it hasn’t.
My daughter is a bit younger, but I’ve never used the various platforms, Facebook pages, etc that all the daycares are trying to use. They figure it out. Hasn’t caused any problems yet.
> Once someone has to make an active decision to contact you instead of just mass-spamming the entire school with a button press I guarantee nobody goes “Yeah, I really should call jacquesm and ask if he can bring coffee to the PTA meeting.
Instead, they make the decision to call you at 3:30pm to inform you that your child needs picking up asap today when they realise your kid hasn't been picked up yet, whilst every other parent found out about the need to arrange an earlier pickup in advance via the after school club's mailing list.
This may be more inconvenient than receiving a few irrelevant emails. Other stuff like being the only kid not in fancy dress or sports kit because nobody would ring you about that even if they were competent at handling the essential stuff may only be inconvenient for your child, of course.
I agree it is a people problem but: the people are ignoring you and the tech is just asking for abuse and that tech too was implemented by a bunch of people who are ignoring you. So absent an outright block on all such messages with the significant risk that one day you'll miss something important there isn't all that much that you can do. Complaining certainly doesn't seem to work (at least: it hasn't worked for me) and the only thing that happened in terms of change is that there now are two portals (and two apps...) to be used because half the teachers refuses to switch to the new one. It is frankly incredible how little attention is given to usability and respect for the user when the user is part of a captive audience. Short of changing schools there is not much that you can do and that isn't an option for a variety of reasons.
Have you ever tried making this complaint? In the context of OP's comment about schools and technology, you will only ever get told "well, everyone else wants this". Sadly, this is true.
I just checked and there are 16 messages from one school in the last 7 days. The other school have managed 11. Those are emails, containing PDFs, containing important dates, if you can find them.
At least they are e-mails. Schools and kindergartens in Poland all switched over to some garbage SaaS that incorporates a half-assed, barely functioning faux-e-mail service, so I have to actually log in to their confusing and ad-infested website every other day and check if the facility sent something new. I would love it if we were using e-mails instead.
I dream that one day organizations will learn that you can in fact just put your message in plain text in the message body, rather than a 1MB PDF or docx
Oh god, schools are the worst. So many messages, very few of them that need to be read. Result: parents don’t read them, then teachers wonder why parents never know any of the stuff they’re sending home.
Let’s go back to physical letters and notes in backpacks.
Unfortunately they have to if they want to make sure parents get it. Every week my school's sends out a weekly email of everything happening in the quarter with emphasis increasing as time get closer. Then there's emails for when parents actually have to do something like sign up. There's physical flyers. There's the private Facebook like app that reiterates when parents have to do something. And the public Google calendar. Parents STILL miss it. And it's not even a few. At this point I just assume I have to tell people in person with my own mouth if I want to make sure they'll do the thing for their kid (and thus make my kid's day better)
"We should have an app for our school, it's only $x00"
Me: What does it do?
Calendar and notifications about new posts
Me: The website already does that, there's a button to click to subscribe to the calendar, another to subscribe to notifications, and you can "install" the website if you want, all with open standards
Surprising, I actually won the argument and they didn't waste their money.
I mean, the school districts I've had kids in all had Microsoft 365 or gmail for the kids, I assume the staff is in the same system. Its really not that hard to send out invites and searchable emails.
I've had an intuition that much recent ouroboric "technology for technology's" sake is actually more pernicious that it appears to be (at first glance).
Reading that essay helped crystallize the "why" behind that feeling.
Sometimes I will be having a conversation with someone and then their phone will buzz or make some sound and the person's attention will shift entirely to the phone. I don't think people realize the effect these gadgets have on their cognition.
I have a phone but it is always on silent. I've decided that it is not acceptable to remotely hijack my attention. No notification on my phone sent by some corporation is ever urgent and basically never requires my immediate attention.
Yeah, and it’s also incredibly rude. Like, we’re having lunch together in person, and mid-sentence, they disappear into their phone for minutes at a time.
I stop hanging out with these types of people. If online bullshit is more important than actual real life, what is even the point?
I leave on notifications for calls and calendar events. That’s it. Texts are silenced but appear on the lock screen. Everything else is a red dot only.
My friends point out how weird this is. But when I see multiple stacks of unread notifications on their lock screens, it seems exhausting.
It's a natural reaction, but these people are actually suffering from an addiction and for at least some of them (those who can take remarks and act on them) it's better to tell them in a friendly way that you are having a discussion.
Most people are aware that cutting off a discussion is impolite and undesirable, they just don't realise they're doing it.
I admire your positive attitude, but it's similar to smackheads, they're just no fun to be around. "Have you thought of taking less Heroin" won't cut it.
I think you're getting downvoted because of your comparison to hard drugs, but you're not wrong about the people.
That phone is more engaging to them than the conversation they're in, and if you try to tell them about it, they use all the same excuses that other addicts use, plus a few more.
Downvotes whatever. The analogy is apposite I think, you do see that addicts and non-addicts do tend to gather into groups, neither finds the company of the other very attractive. In pubs, you often see groups of phone people, each with a half-pint in front of them, each furiously texting away to people they'd rather be spending time with. Top night out!
How do you know it's online bullshit and not a time-sensitive message from family? I'd never do it mid-sentance, but if I hear my Whatsapp notification tone then I will make a mental note to check that fairly soon, because sometimes it is something important
At what point did society, unprompted and unquestioned, shift to using the Whatsapp phone app for actually important urgent serious things instead of, y'know, SMS or a phone call?
I happened because the phone operators made SMS a paid feature, while Whatsapp over wifi was free. Then the people for whom SMS was not free started using Whatsapp (or Messenger or other apps) and eventually those who used to use SMS switched to the same apps because their contacts were using them.
In some places the switch to these apps took longer (like France, because SMS had been free for a long time) but there is a fundamental asymmetry since SMS is free only for part of the users (so the others will never use it) while the apps are free for everyone. In the end, everyone ends up mostly using these apps.
From my experience in France at least, nobody relies on SMS anymore and less and less people on regular calls, it all goes through Whatsapp.
Even I am guilty of that for both SMS and calls, having a single featureful app with contacts ordered by the most recent discussions descending (as in my country SMS is largely replaced by Whatsapp) leads to less friction than having to scroll through my actual phone's contact.
I can answer this! The moment that one tenant in my house didn't have an iPhone, so couldn't be in the house group chat on iMessage. It would take too many calls to coordinate the six people we have at home. Group messaging is the best option, and of those, WhatsApp is the best option.
Around the time smartphone and widespread data coverage made it feasible. It, and other services like it, offered a clearly superior experience to SMS/MMS, and RCS arrived way, way too late. As for why a particular service succeeded in a particular market, I imagine it all comes down to marketing, luck, and network effects. WhatsApp is probably not my ideal service (mostly because it uses somewhat device-tied accounts) but it's what 90% of people use
Almost all phone calls I receive are "actual" phone calls though. And SMS still gets plenty of use as the lowest common denominator for new recipients, but in practice over 95% of my received SMS are from computers now
That's why I believe phone calls should be considered intrusive these days. Unless it's an emergency or you're my mom, you should send a text. I'm not going to notice anyway unless I'm looking at my phone while you call.
I also believe this. The counterpoint was made to me by a close friend who prefers to call (I also have friends who _only_ call) - "you really only engage people on your own terms" - which in some ways makes me a bad friend.
Well why not agree on a time to call via text so it can be on both parties terms. Or speak on my voicemail if they absolutely insist on calling, as I probably won't pick up.
When someone says "on your own terms" what they really mean is "I want it on my terms instead". There's no defense against it, because anything you suggest is "on your own terms" again.
He got a lot of good points, except I don't share the experience of phobia. Probably because of my job which required me to take and make calls regularly. Since then I don't feel the slightest bit of phobia, just a strong annoyance when someone interrupts my day. Everything else is very agreeable.
The pandemic, years of Ivy League scholar manipulation via social media companies, and generally everything almost tied to your phone (banking, investments, work...).
I started just sitting there silent and waiting for them to finish and I've found it pretty successful in getting them to stop doing it.
Usually people use someone looking at their phone as an excuse to pull theirs out and start playing with it. Think refusing to do that yourself and just waiting for them to stop messing with it sends enough of a message.
It's called "allow repeat caller" on android, on my pixel 3a it's under Notifications > do not disturb > People > Calls. From there you can chose the option for all "starred contacts" or individual contacts
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.