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
I think it's vital to strictly manage what notifications we allow our phones to give us. Unfortunately, I've noticed a trend where apps are becoming less cooperative. Many apps will have a single all-or-nothing notification setting. Others have dozens of vague, poorly-labelled categories. And all of this is hidden several clicks deep in configuration settings. The result is that we can't be sure which notifications to allow because they are important (your food is here, your credit card has a security alert) and which are just marketing bullshit, which is almost all of them.
I'd like to see a regulation requiring all notifications to be opt-in at app installation, with appropriate separation of notification categories, thereby putting the onus on the company to tell us why we should let them have our attention in each specific way.
I also think it's vital to have our phones silenced (including vibration) for nearly all notifications all of the time. But that's more for my personal benefit.
Like Uber notifications- you don’t want to miss any alerts for your trip, but then they abuse your trust and send you app updates, discounts or upselling
They probably did all of this to increase some KPI. The more fine grained authorization system problem resulted in less interactions. A lot of applications have too many incentives to keep you engaged as long as possible.
I think apple has a nice setting where you can disable all notifications after a certain time slot in the evening. But this only works in the evenings, during the day they can still spam all day long.
At this point i cannot trust application developers anymore so we probably need an additional layer between the application and the OS to filter the notifications. If applications do not want to give you fine grained permissions. All you can do is give the application the permission and then have an additional layer filter the notifications with some kind of firewall rule.
A notification management system sounds like something that needs to exist, but how would it work if companies don't adhere to standards? I don't see any way out of this that doesn't first involve legislation.
Technology moves really fast and laws move really slow. Hence i would prefer if we had a solution that would not require this kind of legislative intervention. But as you say a lot of applications will not play nice. And neither google nor apple really has the incentive to fix it on their side. Only an outside force could force this but i do not see how you would legislate this in a future proof way. And it would probably need to become a legislation adopted by multiple big companies before they would roll it out to all countries.
I would trust that about as much as I trust their spam filtering, which is very little. And notifications are usually a lot more important than any given email these days.
That's super weird to me because spam filtering works amazingly for me. I don't think I will buy an iPhone because of how well the machine learning based features on Android have been working on my pixel.
That would be nuts. What would be the incentive for people to “opt in” to marketing spam? Get 10% off your next order if you leave marketing notifications on for 1 month?
Also the UI would be a mess. UX would be terrible. Most people would probably ignore the massive list of options, and then complain later as to why the app isn’t notifying them :dead:
If you leave marketing spam on, you get notified on cupons and deals, seems fine for me if you want to. I don't have a problem with stores notifying me on deals on my wishlist.
My kid (soon to be 11 years old) has this problem and is (almost) driving me nuts. There are three causes of this:
1) He's dumb. Will click and install on any crap he comes by.
2) He doesn't know to operate his phone. Every now and then I take his phone and turn off notifications for the apps I saw that popped them.
#3: This one's mysterious to me as well. Somehow they (the notifications) get re-enabled back. I'm disabling notifications (to the best of my knowledge, navigating arcane settings paths), they disappear for some time then after a while, start popping again. No app ever asked me "I noticed you turned off notifications ... ahem, do you want them turned back on?". No, they just turn it back automatically ... when I navigate back to the arcane settings path hidden under some 3 to 7 unintuitive menu layers.. the setting's back on. Think "Settings .. Privacy protection .. special permissions ... notification access" ... each of these steps hidden among 10 to 20 other menu options. What chances does a kid have to fight this crap?
I dunno, just using the apps seems to enable them after a while. And it's not just "Malware Disguised As Game XYZ". YouTube, Netflix, Facebook... all these bounce back, on my phone as well. Just seems that not so often as on my kid's and also I disable them back promptly when it happens so it's a manageable level of annoyance.
My kid's phone though ... I call him and he doesn't reply. Why? Coze he turns the sound volume off, just so he can have some peace of mind. Otherwise it's "ping ping ping ping", relentlessly throughout the day and night.
>> From the article: "Half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications a day" .
That seems about right. It's maddening. Barely manageable as a tech-aware adult, in the hands of a kid, today's phone technology and it's inability to stop this crap it's the incarnation of evil.
> in the hands of a kid, today's phone technology and it's inability to stop this crap it's the incarnation of evil.
I'm going to be that guy: this honestly just sounds like you're abdicating your parental responsibility and placing the blame on the tech. Yes, the tech is bad, but there's no reason why your kid should be subjected to the full weight of its awfulness besides that you let him.
Step one is to question whether a smartphone is even necessary at this age. I understand feeling the need to have them be able to reach you, and pay phones and school landlines are less accessible than they once were. But why a smartphone? Peer pressure is not a good enough answer.
If there is a compelling reason for a smartphone (like the other commenter whose school bus system inexplicably requires kids to have an app) then iOS has pretty robust parental controls from what I understand, but I personally would go further and buy an Android phone and install even stronger controls. There are FOSS Android apps that allow you to block everything except for a few whitelisted apps, and there are others that can impose time limits.
A pretty simple combination of apps can create an experience that is suitable to any age, gradually enabling more functionality as you trust him more. We've even done this with our 4-year-old and an old tablet, giving him access to Khan Academy Kids with a time limit.
> whether a smartphone is even necessary at this age
When I was 11, I spent large amounts of time playing with my peers, unsupervised, around my neighbourhood.
In 2023, this is an impossible dream. Even in parts of the world where you wouldn't be arrested for child abandonment if you let a child that age roam unsupervised, general consensus is that it is simply not safe for a child to exist outside the home, school or a paid-for-by-the-hour supervised activity space without their guardian in the picture.
As a society, we've taken away all opportunity for unstructured, unprompted socialisation in the real world. Kids must either learn to socialise online or not at all, since this is all we have left them.
There are companies out there like Gabb that specifically make phones for kids with comprehensive parental controls. You can even get them just a watch that lets them call and text approved contacts, if that's all you need it for.
As someone who was raised in a home without TV, sorry, but this is nonsense.
I heard this dozens of times, but in reality, having a phone, a tv, a gameboy isn't going to make a difference.
On the contrary, a kid without the latest consumerist gadget will likely have to develop social skills, and also will have to form new tastes and do different activities, such as reading, sport, etc etc - that will make him less isolated and a better individual.
Anecdata, but my son is raised in a home without screens, and he's the most sociable toddler of the playground. Probably because his dopamine receptors aren't overloaded and that he's enjoying the stimulation of social interactions!
I was raised to think for myself and avoid doing things just because my friends do them. It's worked out rather well for me, and I very much intend to help my kids learn the same.
This is very true. The simple explanation is your son is turning them back on without noticing. Uber Eats is the example I can think of, where in order to get notifications about arrival, you need to enable ALL notifications, including its spam ones. I'm sure this sort of lock-out + beg screen is happening in the apps your son uses.
I hate to do a bit of snooping, but you list your birth year on your socials. We're of a pretty similar age; I also only got a smart phone in high school.
I really do think the expectations from your friends when you're in your early teens in the current year, is that you have a smart phone. It's probably a major part of social life now, which would leave a kid pretty excluded. Not even touching the things in life that REQUIRE a smart phone now. (Restaurant menus, transit, maps, etc)
Our childhood is pretty much gone from existence, despite how modern it feels. I feel for the GP author, best you can do is make things as protected as you can.
I'm a parent of extremely well adjusted kids who have no smartphones, and it's only isolating if the parents aren't involved. By that I mean we can coordinate with friends and friends parents for our children, which is just a good practice anyway.
Call me a helicopter parent if you'd like, but we've found that our kids have strong friend support groups, and all the parents are now friends as well (or at least friendly), thus creating a healthy sort of community.
I list my birth year on my socials? Time to take that off, that’s unintentional. :P
But yes, I feel your sentiment is right. Although there has to be some moderation—I wouldn’t expose my children to the excess of social media. Internet addiction has messed enough with my life, the last thing I’d like to do is pass that on.
I don’t know how long ago that was so it’s hard to say “things are different now”, but my 11 year old can’t take the school bus without having a mobile app for her ticket.
How is that even legal? School buses are provided in part as a service to low-income families. Who decided it was okay to require parents of middle schoolers to shell out for a smart phone for their kids?
As far as I can tell, someone has “digitised” the local buses by adding tracking and cashless payments to go along with the mobile app.
They’ve also fragmented the services even more in the process since each bus company has their own version of the app (it’s just a skinning of the base app). It means I need to check back and forth between two apps to see which buses are on time. Naturally you can only buy a pass that only works on one bus route. The ux is pretty garbage.
Dealing with public transport in rural England definitely made me appreciate the seamlessness of transport in London.
Oh, I was assuming a US-style school bus system where a separate yellow bus goes around and picks up the kids. It sounds like your kid rides a regular public transit bus to get to school? It's still unfair to have that system be inaccessible without a smartphone, but it's not as completely incomprehensible.
It sounds like they definitely need better UX, and the buses around here very much accept cash still (or special tokens if you buy ahead).
The one that she takes in particular is a school bus, in a weird kind of way. Seems that it’s run by a private company but it only services kids travelling to and from a couple of schools.
But yes, it’s not like the big yellow ones the rest of us know from The Simpsons.
Complain to the school board. In person, at a meeting. Post about it on social media - you'll find you're far from alone in objecting to that ridiculous requirement.
Are you sure? I don't have a smartphone and I also live in England. There are lots of services where the happy path expects a smartphone but I'm yet to find a service that actually requires it.
My kid got a smart phone at age 7 when they started school.
It's still mostly in their backpack and they regularly miss calls and messages from friends because it's always on mute and still in the school bag even though it's already evening =)
You need to normalise these things and teach how to manage it from an early age.
Like screen time is a completely normal thing in our family, it has been activated since the second they got the phone. Every app category has a specific daily screen time - the only ones with no limits are communication tools and educational apps.
The problem is that modern smartphones and app are designed to create addiction through finely tuned positive reinforcement triggers and rewards. The younger a kid is exposed, the most likely he will be affected all of his life by the addiction.
"Normalizing" it akin to normalizing cigarettes - some kids could indeed manage to smoke only one a week, but most won't.
The point is to teach them these things from a young age. If you don't let the addiction build, it's less likely to happen later.
And don't let your 7yo use "apps are designed to create addiction through finely tuned positive reinforcement triggers", that's a given. Get them using apps that don't have that so that the move to "tuned addiction apps" is jarring even to them.
There's a corollary with alcohol. In countries where even kids get (diluted) wine at a young age with food - because it's part of the meal - they don't get the need to get f'd up with the strong stuff.
They get a mental association that alcohol is something you drink for the flavour and in moderation - it's not a tool for self-medicating mental issues.
Same with ads, we've been a DVD/BD/streaming-only household for ages so now ads on TV are a curiosity to the kids. We actually have a competition who mutes the TV fastest when the ads starts in the few occasions we watch something that has any.
My kids are 6 and 2. Right now the wife and I are trying to hold off getting them phones until they are driving. I'm sure that could change when they're in middle school and high school, and whining because all their friends have phones. But, I'm going to try my best to hold the line.
You start teaching them at an early age how society may see it as no big deal, but society is wrong and it's a very big deal. Show them through your actions that life is better lived without such distractions.
And be prepared for everyone to call you a conspiracy nut. But you eventually let that roll off your back when you see how happy your kids are just being kids.
What brutal modern life problems require smart phone with unlimited access?
Most problems we face in our lives haven't changed a zilch - its simply interacting with people for whatever reasons. You don't need phone for that, in fact you should first work on handling face-to-face interactions and only then move to remote ones.
Kids can grok how phone and app works in few weeks through and through and much faster than you or me currently, so that they are not missing anything if they start later. There is very little to 'learn' by further usage of it, just feeding addictions.
I'd love that option, but highschool mandates a smartphone, go figure: let's give attention deficit teenagers an always on distraction device and then complain about how hard it is to keep them focused.
Granted I’m still very early in my parenting years but if my child’s high school requires a smartphone I feel like I’m going to be viewed as a kook because I’ll turn up to meetings shouting at them about how they’ve failed the kids from a social development standpoint.
Not only that, many of them will be themselves glued to the phones while you execute your elaborate speech about child development, missing your point entirely and consider you some medieval crook during those 2 seconds they will be focusing on you.
Lets not act like parents are stellar in this, because more often than not they aren't and most issues with kids come from this direction (as a parent of small kids I really can't blame anybody else if we mess up something, not at this age)
Not only that, he's using my Google account, so it's managed as one of my devices :) With full access to unrestricted YouTube premium, Google Play, etc.
He's only got limits with respect to the time he spends on the phone or PC. So far hasn't discovered or been interested in "naughty" content.
I was forced to live in the "middle ages", communist Romania with no TV, no electricity, go to bed at candle's light, half an hour of cartoons on TV per week when that wasn't canceled to show the achievements of The Great Leader instead. I won't deny my kid access to entertainment and technology in the name of some dreamed up "Amish lifestyle / return to innocence" because there's no such thing.
You don't have to pick between leaving your kid completely unsheltered from exploitation by capitalist forces and being Amish.
You yourself have seen that your kid isn't ready to fend off the exploitation by himself. Setting up parental controls on the phone is in exactly the same category as providing him with food and clothing and shelter—you're supposed to do for him what he can't yet do for himself.
You can work on teaching him how to resist exploitation over time, but it's irresponsible to expose him to the worst excesses of capitalism while he's clearly so unprepared.
Yes. IPhones (and android too iirc) also have a robust screen time system we use for our kids. Problem is that Apple doesn't make it very easy to use if you're not familiar with tech... and I've seen several frustrating UX/sync bugs with it. Could be a lot better, but it's there - especially important to limit them charging in-game purchases to your card without prompting for approval.
A radical idea - maybe kids, if they really have to have a smart phone, should not have any credit card stored in it? I've only heard about fuckups when this is allowed.
Unless they have to pay ie for their bus rides or lunches via some idiotic app, then... some extremely limited debit card with no chance going below 0 maybe?
Several of the replies to this comment are disappointing. They provide no evidence that they know anything about the commenter, their situation, or parenting, and yet they feel qualified to jump to the conclusion that the commenter is to blame for this situation.
Why not be more respectful? Parenting is hard. Maybe ask some polite, open-ended questions before jumping in as yet another judgmental stranger from the internet with zero skin in the game.
> I call him and he doesn't reply. Why? Coze he turns the sound volume off, just so he can have some peace of mind. Otherwise it's "ping ping ping ping", relentlessly throughout the day and night.
Same for me. I usually call people back after an hour or two when I check my phone. I fucking wish Android had an option to disable ALL notifications BUT all calls.
Not sure about stock Android, but my eOS phone has a toggle in sound preferences "link notification and ring volumes", and if I disable it, I can manage ring volume and notification volume separately.
This isn't something that can be solved with "better tech". It is something that is solved with "less tech" or "no tech" entirely.
I wrote a book on this topic too as a millennial who grew up as one of the first waves of smartphones and social media users. I firmly believe it contributed to mental health challenges. We need to find a point where we say we've had "enough".
It is something that is solved with "less tech" or "no tech" entirely.
i don't believe that. I love technology and always want to have access to a computer (although I also love leaving it off and using paper or analog tools).
But I have a pretty unforgiving standard for people-misusing-technology. Last week I went into a store I hadn't seen before, specializing in imported Asian liquors, drinks, cocktail stuff. I decided to buy a fruit drink. Approached the counter, pulled out a $5 bill, and the guy said 'oh we're not taking cash' and waved at the terminal. It would have been just as easy to whip out my card, but instead I said 'I don't shop at stores that don't handle cash' and put the drink back (though with hindsight I should have left it on the counter, or left the $5 and walked out with my drink, giving up the change).
This was rude behavior on my part. But the squeaky wheel gets the grease, at least in the US. If you're polite, nobody cares.
What I mean is that people nowadays typically don't pay attention to complaints voiced politely. Rudeness is unpleasant but more effective in getting people's attention.
There’s absolutely no need for a book length treatment for this problem, but the way ideas work in this society, they aren’t taken seriously unless there’s a single-topic book with a catchy title, with an attendant book store tour, podcast blitz, and morning show invite.
It’s incredibly obvious that we should not be on our phones all time, and more so for kids.
It's definitely why I finally bit the bullet and spent about a week or so to refine all of my "focus" status in iOS and have them automatically engage depending on geo-location or specific time of day.
After a week of observing what worked/didn't work for me I enjoy my phone more and get the notifications I want when I want.
Before setting up the focus groups I definitely was receiving too many useless notifications damn near every hour.
That's seriously what FocusMode is good for on iOS/iPhone and Mac. Get them setup and choose the limited stuff you want and need to hear from. Less is more, do what the President does.
It goes a long way towards relieving the anxiety of feeling there's something important but not remembering the thing itself or its temporal context.
So I'll advocate "Stolen Focus" by Johann Hari [0] and my "Digtal Vegan" [1]
Johann's book has some surprises toward the end, that go way deeper into environmental
and cultural factors. He ultimately sees it as a collective/societal problem
with collective solutions. Mine tries to advocate for mindful control and rejection of
toxic tech and makes it a more individual battle.
This stuff is so hard for me to understand. I put actual time and effort into avoiding those notifications - i try to give new apps a fair shake, but when spam notifications start to show, I slowly ratchet back notification privileges until eventually I just uninstall the app, especially if I’ve disabled notification permissions and it keeps begging me to re enable them.
To me, this sounds like teens - people, really, because plenty of people ‘somehow’ wind up in this exact situation, where ‘somehow’ there’s just too many notifications on their phone to keep up with, as if it’s some sort of inexorable force of nature that it’s futile to resist. It just comes off as such bullshit to my ears, it’s nothing more than unwillingness to take responsibility for your own choices, and to put effort towards arranging your environment in a way that suits you.
If your phone is doing things you don’t want it to do, your response should never be to just shrug and say “oh well I guess that’s the way things are for me now.”
Given how many times I see that same situation expanded to encompass someone’s entire approach to managing their life in general, I really shouldn’t be surprised - I just cannot understand why taking control of that stuff and working to resist the things you don’t want just does not seem to be a priority for so many people. They just let bad things happen to them. It’s mind boggling.
The fact that teens are struggling with this doesn’t even seem significant to me. This attitude is everywhere regardless of age.
One of the things I love about Android is the extremely granular controls on app notifications, it allows me to fine tune the disruption level of particular types of alerts or messages from app to app so that I'm only alerted to stuff I care about.
I see the 'food delivery app' come up a few times in this thread. Do you really need an app to use such services in some countries? Whenever I want to order a meal for delivery I just go to the restaurant's website, or sometimes look at the list of available restaurants in Thuisbezorgd.nl (part of the company which owns Grubhub etc.) and then visit the restaurant website and order there. If there's something that needs addressing, the restaurant just calls me (which is almost never). I can't imagine installing a bunch of dedicated apps for services which just require my money and some basic interface.
Where I live, the only restaurants that offer delivery are Chinese and Pizza, and this is pretty typical for most locales. What grubhub did was antagonistically create delivery services for literally every restaurant and collect those menus into their own app. If the restaurant doesn't cooperate they will just call the place and pretend to be a customer. They also buy ads so that when you search for <some restaurant delivery> you will get a dynamically generated grubhub page that 'looks official'.
I didn't know that. That's way beyond what Just Eat/Takeaway does in Europe. They have a predatory business model of course; restaurants either join them, or loose customers accustomed to seeing every available delivery option in one place, but if a restaurant doesn't want them, they don't resort to such tricks (I don't think they could without falling foul of some regulations, mainly the issue of reselling a product already taxed in a business to consumer transaction).
A lot of restaurants are fighting back and do join Thuisbezorgd and whatever local iteration Just Eat/Takeaway has, but they also ask their customers to use their own website instead. It saves them a lot of money.
It's a courtesy for the delivery person, so they don't have to ring and wait for you to get to the door. Instead you get a notification when they are getting close to your house (via GPS tracking).
Wow. That's… Totally not done here in the Netherlands.
It's not really an issue either, because doors are typically within a few metres from the street, and people answer fairly promptly when food was ordered (because you are hungry and your food is there, which would seem obvious).
Give them 1* reviews for it, and encourage everybody you know to do likewise. It doesn't take that many of them to ruin somebody's day at the producer.
For sure there are some apps that abuse the system but most are quite good with it. And I can say that e.g. Doordash and Uber Eats both give you granular control over notifications related to your delivery updates, Uber actually gives you about a dozen categories of alerts.
And some apps (like Play Store) just have too many to wade through - pages and pages, with labels which in some cases aren't obvious as to what they do. The kitchen-sink overload is equally problematic.
As an iPhone user, I turn off notifications for mostly every app except for Reminders, Calendar, etc time-sensitive stuff. For specific third-party apps that may also require important push notifications (eg. Uber), I can just go into the app and turn off "marketing/promo" notifications or whatever.
Replace Android here with - let's say - a narcissistic person. The same sentence would still make sense. Something like "I love how my narcissistic partner requires an extremely granular control so I can adjust their level of disruption to me."
I'm not making fun of you, it's just that your sentence made the similarities so painfully clear to me.
"Android" is not the source of the notifications, the source is a nebulous cloud of apps that I installed on my phone. In a more apt analogy you could imagine each app as a person, some are more chatty than others, some with more important things to say than others, Android acts as an automated secretary that filters and transmits messages with the appropriate sense of urgency based on my preferences.
A majority of these notifications are the teens communicating with their peers. That's how you get an absurd total like thousands a day.
Much of their socializing has moved online. Parents have effectively encouraged this trend, despite complaining about phone time.
People are far less willing to let their children just hang around the neighborhood, or walk to a friend's home these days, which forces communication through phone or desktop app instead.
> People are far less willing to let their children just hang around the neighborhood, or walk to a friend's home these days, which forces communication through phone or desktop app instead.
In America, often “walking to a friend’s home” is a 45-60 minute walk. Crossing multiple busy streets and the sad excuse suburbanites call “boulevards”. Suburban neighborhoods are often the worst as far as safety is concerned. Drivers don’t give af about pedestrians. Sidewalks non-existent or abruptly end.
Biking may reduce the travel time but still sharing those roads with highly irritable commuters finishing their 45-60 minute commute from hell. Bike infra in the suburbs? Paint up the road, add a sign indicating it’s a “shared lane” and that passes as “bike infrastructure” in some of these neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, this is not something new. It has been going on for decades. Want to know why the kid in the 90s-00s spent most of their time at home playing video games? That’s because it was the only thing to do in a suburban setting.
Unfortunately suburban sprawl in America has led to people becoming more and more spread out, so it's no surprise communication takes place over long (not easily walkable) distance, where nobody knows their neighbors because ultimately they need to get in their car to go anywhere, complete isolating themselves from the world around them.
This thread has people explaining how they've got notifications disabled, which makes a lot of sense. But remember that most of us are techies here. The average teenager doesn't know what "Unix" means, and plausibly just accepts the default settings for most apps.
> Apple should make a version of - Allow notifications for 1 hour.
That’s a great idea, the question is, how would you activate it? Ideally it would happen automatically when you eg placed a delivery order, but you couldn’t allow the app to control or it would be abused. But if it’s not automatic then most users would likely never use it (or even know it exists).
Perhaps the problem is not the quantity of notifications, but quality. If these notifications were about meaningful social interactions, like how Apple or Google shows them in their marketing materials - friends calling and messaging friends, then it wouldn't be concerning. Most of the stuff real people get notified about, though, is really made by machines for machines (given the volume of information).
Phones back in the later 2000s were purposeful devices. Email spam was a problem.
Now, notifications have replaced emails, and they are right in your face. Kids have not been educated on how to stop these things, and the average person seems to just let all the notifications and ads in.
The people pushing to make these notifications easier to push to people are to blame. Not the teens.
One of the very important skills to learn in this era is purposeful curation of one's own attention.
If you don't keep the avenues of interruptions into your daily life in check they will overwhelm you.
Everyone everywhere wants you to look at their thing or listen to their thing every time they have a new thing. You have to aggressively pare down what gets through and when.
Only the absolute most important things should be able to interrupt you. You can probably count those things on one hand.
Calls from spammers are not on this list.
Email newsletters are not on this list.
Notifications of new comments on a post are not on this list.
New articles on a publication you read are not on this list.
At the end of the day, everyone's list is different.
Turn off notifications on most things. Unsubscribe from most things. Push notifications off for most things. Persistent notification dots and numbers off. Sounds off.
Take your attention back. It doesn't always come naturally to learn this skill but in 2023 deciding if, when, and where you will pay attention to something is paramount.
I straight up uninstall apps that send me unsolicitated notifications.
"You haven't played this game in x days..." yeah you are right, time to uninstall it :)
I remember the first day I got an Apple Watch: I got a buzz, which was a notification for NewEgg. It was a sale notification and I realized (in horror) that this was the real-life version of a pop up ad. I disabled all notifications (save messages and calls) right then and there. It’s crazy.
Marketing people are trash, episode someverylargenumber
You know where we need lots of marketing people? Mars. I think we should send them there first to build the consumer society that will be necessary for colonizing a new planet, perhaps in some sort of space Ark.
One of my favorite things about running GrapheneOS without Google Play Services is that most apps aren't even set up to push a notification to me this way.
Signal is, and it's the only app I care to be notified by!
This study is not representative of all teens' smartphone use, as iPhone users were not included in the study:
"iPhone users were not included because data collection access for detailed app usage (i.e., names of specific apps such as YouTube, Snapchat, etc.) was not available for researchers at the time of data collection." -- Methodology section of the acutal report: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/researc...
According to an April 2023 report from Piper Sandler, 87% of teens use iPhones (https://www.pipersandler.com/teens). If the CommonSense Media report doesn't include 88% of teens, then it is not representative of the majority of teens' use; it is only representative of teens who use Android devices.
This report is probably under-reporting teen smartphone use and notification overload.
I got a weird, semi-experimental Chinese phone at the moment (HiSense A9, the defining feature is that it has an e-ink screen). It comes without Google Play services, and with no ability to install them. It also doesn't have the Huawei alternative services or anything, just nothing.
A side-effect is that in 90% of apps notifications don't work, and it's really quite nice. The remaining ones that do work are apps where somebody put in the work to fall back to something else because they're actually important, like banking apps.
Almost everything that wants to send me a notification get put into scheduled summary on my phone. It’s much easier to deal with them a few times a day rather than at random times.
How do you do that? I would love the ability to "batch" notifications from certain apps. Eg every second hour they notify, if any notification is pending.
On android there's an app called Buzzkill that can do it. I have my notifications batched during the workday and mute successive notifications from that one friend who chats with way too many linebreaks.
For iOS - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201925
On Android, I believe there are apps that will copy and dismiss your notifications, so you have a similar experience.
Article quotes kids as young as 11-14 being inundated by notifications ... kids that age do not need phones. Its really that simple. Parents need to start being parents again.
The problem is peer pressure and the fact that most parents want to have a way to be in contact with their children at all times. You could get your kid a flip phone, but your kid is going to be an outcast if anybody finds out.
Then you're in the wrong school district. This is certainly true in some parts of the US. We went to a lot of trouble to make sure we lived somewhere (a fairly safe and affordable part of a very walkable, diverse large east coast US city) where this would not be a problem, and it has paid off. Having a flip phone is not an issue here (in middle school).
Some random suburb, especially where the parents aren't super educated, is usually going to be hell for this though. A lot of parents who don't know/care/are too impoverished in terms of time or knowhow, end up just using the smartphone as an all purpose babysitter (much as TV in the 80s and 90s) from toddler or even baby age on.
It's always been the case that when you choose where you live you choose what kind of peers your kid will have, and therefore, to a degree, what kind of person they'll become, but smartphones have dialed this effect up.
> half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications a day. Some get nearly 5,000 in 24 hours
> Such a "highly stimulating environment" may affect kids' "cognitive ability, attention span and memory during a time when their brains are still developing,” Maxwell said. “What are the long-term consequences? I don't think we know."
Then why are 11- to 17-year-olds even allowed near a smartphone?
While this problem applies to everyone, it unfortunately affects younger brains FAR more than mature brains. I think Jonathan Haidt's work said kids shouldn't be having these kinds of technological interactions and prompts until at least the age of 15/16.
Has anyone found any 'solutions' when managing technology with their kids? A colleague of mine has just a blanket rule of no smart phones until they're 14 and then no social media such as tiktok. His kids seem to respect it because they now see how silly everyone looks on their smartphones the whole time (having not been indoctrinated during their early teens).
Only thing I have notifications turned on for are things that require immediate attention like messages or maybe emails. Disabling notifications is the first thing I do after installing an app, which should be the default setting for any app.
Lifelong "tech head" yet I've slowly come to the conclusion that we've increasingly reached the point where smartphone usage is "barely/rarely" OK for adults let alone for under 18 year olds.
One issue with A/B testing something obnoxious like misusing a legitimate notification channel to push marketing is that the metrics only measure the upside.
There is no ClickHouse dashboard metric for “infuriated the user”.
Very few companies actively measure the negative impact of their actions. This happens in physical stores as well, run a promotion pushing some product or brand and only measure if that increases sale. It's not easy, actually it's borderline impossible to measure how many you're unintentionally turning way do to your business practices.
Big Tech is the modern quarry: our attention is the solid rocks that big tech breaks into small pieces, so it can steal those one by one and sell them to advertisers. In return it gives us useless plastic thinklets.
One of the things I hated about moving to iOS from Android is that the Garmin iOS app doesn't give you per-app controls over what notifications are pushed to the watch. At least on Android, I could easily control watch notifications per app, so that only "important" apps' notifications would buzz my watch. But on iOS, some random slack DM is going to wake me up on my days off..
So if I want to sleep in, I need to remember to both put my phone in "sleep focus" and either change the Garmin notification hours, or just disable bluetooth.
It's my older clients who are inundated with prompts constantly. I can't even have a Zoom call and maintain their attention. On their side it's ding... ding... whoosh... ding...
I don't know if they know what DND is and how to turn it on. I suspect they do, but it doesn't cross their mind not to see an email or answer a phone call the moment it arrives.
Adults do not, while reading about teenagers as if the adult is exempt and better equipped to navigate this reality
In my experience, the way an adult deals with their phone is 100% based on if they are
cohabitating with anyone, especially romantically, the ones with oblivious disruptive habits are not and have not been.
I don't get email updates for work accounts, limit slack notifications and still put everything in a work profile. When I'm not working, I turn everything off but my pager.
If you need me after my working hours feel free to page me, if IRS jot important enough to page then you'll have to wait until I get back to my desk.
I muted a ton of useless Slack channels everyone is expected to be in, but some bot notifications somehow get through. It got worse lately which I assume is an Android or Slack bug, or both. Slack + bad management is the ultimate job enshittifier.
Sure, but monitor group slack Channels on your computer. Sure everyone needs to be in #company-announce but you surely don't need to read that outside of the times you are at your desk.
You can limit notifications to direct mentions and times as well.
My favorite are the people who send weekly (ACTION REQUIRED) emails that begin with, "If you don't use xyz, please disregard". Do these people have no self awareness? Is it some kind of outward narcissism?
My browser (Safari) has an option to prevent websites asking for notifications. I could imagine that not all do, but having that seems order-qualifying for using a particular browser.
One day I'll kids with phones, and I'll want to save their sanity. Does anybody know if MDM allows you to configure notifications? I'd enforce the same setting I have on my phone, which is Do Not Disturb past midnight until 7:30.
We need to start treating human attention as the scare, valuable resource it is. (Ditto for consumer goodwill).
Defaults on smartphones today make them worse than the annoying, noise-making novelty toys you used to buy your neighbours kids to drive their parents crazy.
There is a huge benefit IMO to trimming down which apps are allowed to send notifications, and running your phone in DND mode all the time. I set exceptions for calls from family, since those are usually a fairly urgent thing.
Before Launcher is great if you want to silence notifications selectively and make the home screen less attractive. Noisy apps no more; only one or two apps get to interrupt me. I happily pay for the premium version.
AFAIK, an app can’t influence notifications from other apps. At least on iOS. Less sure about Android. This is something that has to come from
the OS level.
Ah, yes, alarm fatigue. I wonder what the affects are of alarm fatigue outside of work on safety-sensitive jobs that also have alarm fatigue of their own (i.e. medical/nursing tasks).
Just because they chose to focus on teens does not mean that adults do not have similar issues. Not every article needs to encompass every single category affected by a problem.
I don’t know for sure but I can guess why it would be worse for teens.
During your teenage years there’s a lot more FOMO as you are trying to establish yourself in your peer group and the social hierarchy in general. This must-check-that-notification then compelled them to react to it, which generates more notifications in a feedback loop.
Compare that to now, when I’m in my mid 30s, if an app generates too many notifications I will revoke its permissions to notify me very quickly, all of my social interactions are more asynchronous and slower and deeper, since I’m not being interrupted by notifications all the time and am communicating on my own terms
I think as parents, our job is to help teach them that this FOMO is fake and unnecessary, that the perceived "social hierarchy" is meaningless and nobody will care about it after high school is over. So they don't have to wait until they are 30 to figure it out on their own.
I completely disagree. It's important to teach them to time-box and have the self discipline to try and control these things - but participation in the social structures of peers and society during the formative adult years is crucial to developing the social skills of being an adult. To dismiss them as meaningless is very naive.
Arguing that the social heirarchy is meaningless is utter nonsense because our work structures, family structures, political structures, friend structures, distribution structures, financial systems AND ENTIRE CULTURE is built upon social hierarchies, and while you might argue that the social heirarchy at high school is meaningless once highschool is over, the skills gained in navigating it will persist through the persons entire adulthood.
Agreed. The internet is full of sad men who didn't successfully figure out how to talk to girls in high school / college. There's a critical window for learning how to be social that if missed is difficult to recover from, because the lack of confidence and early success quickly causes them to fall even further behind.
Parents shouldn't be so dismissive of teens and their attempts to fit in and be socially normal. It's extremely important, possibly more important than academics.
According to the media hysteria of any given moment, teens are always inundated with one new threat after another, and maybe they sometimes even really are, but they deserve a bit of credit for resilience, and in any case i'd call this one fairly mild in comparison to historical dangers.
Compared to past worries like military conscription (often deadly), mass state propaganda, and the crazy political cultures of decades past, the threat today from phones to teenagers is pretty tame and even gives them easy access to real information and data so much better than the past allowed for hammering down nonsense ideas and dishonest, manipulative claims. These latter two things have always been thrown at kids, today they finally have immediately accessible tools for digging deeper like never in human history.
Also, for when phones really do get tedious with an overload of corporate marketing and promotion garbage (Thanks so many of you high-paid BigTech/AdTech workers later commenting against online BigTech advertising right here on this very site!), you see, all modern devices have these little physical and digital buttons that let you set parameters to their behavior. Unbelievable as it seems, by pressing them in certain ways, it's possible to mute all sorts of notifications and prompts. My phone is right beside me all day, silent and discreet as an English butler unless I actively open it and seek sometimes, all because i set it to shut the fuck up with just a few moments of touch and clicking around. Any teen can usually do the same just as easily.
I know that many on HN will blather on about "disinformation", teen self esteem through social media and so forth as modern phone-related risks. However, much of this too is exaggerated or describes dangers lighter than the youth isolation of the past, which kids before mass digital communication had far fewer avenues for escaping from through access to their own personal interests and circles online.
If one thing truly is a danger to teens in modern phones and digital communications via social media spheres, its not so much too many notifications as it is the normalization of total 24-hour surveillance by faceless entities "serving your interests" and the inevitable data collection that makes young indiscretions now ever more literally unforgettable in the worst sense of the word.
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.