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.
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