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How much information do app devs get when customers disable app notifications from their app entirely? Some apps (especially food delivery.. doordash, i'm loo

How much information do app devs get when customers disable app notifications from their app entirely? Some apps (especially food delivery.. doordash, i'm looking at you) have such spammy notifications, I tend to disable notifications from the app entirely unless I'm actively using it (eg, an order is pending).

function_seven 3y ago
My feature request for iOS: Allow me to disable notifications from an app unless I have opened it within the last X hours. I’d set it to a couple hours. My food apps could then tell me the order is ready, but can’t spam me with “Special Offers For You” days later. Maybe I can do this with an automation?
- fennecfoxy 3y ago
  Or just fix the root problem so that the notification is just a notification and not a way to harvest data, I guess.
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  I'd LOVE this. I also want something else that I wonder if I could dummy up myself. I want to change certain phone behaviors based on whether or not a given Bluetooth device is connected. My use case is "when I'm on my motorcycle, connected to headset audio, I want (a) the phone to read me texts and (b) to turn on navigation audio." I do not want either of these things UNLESS I'm on the motorcycle with the Cardo turned on.
  - acosmism 3y ago
    it might be possible to get this together using apple's "shortcuts" app
    - ubermonkey 3y ago
      No hooks for what I want there, sadly.
- piva00 3y ago
  Seconding that I'd love this. At the same time, has App Store's guidelines/rules changed to allow spammy ads notifications? It used to be 100% disallowed and I worked for a company that got an app denied because of it until changed, nowadays it seems to just be completely common. I fucking hate it.
  - yreg 3y ago
    Yeah, Apple should properly write/enforce App Store rules on this. Make marketing notification a separate permission if necessary and be strict about it. After all, topics like this are why we succumb to their curation and App Store monopoly instead of using more open devices.
    - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
      Apple with its current incentives will never do this. I’m sure they know quite well which % of their services revenue comes from enticing push notifications from casino games. But with all that said, don’t kid yourself with any thoughts that the “we” in your sentence refers to anything more than a practically immaterially small contingent of nerds. Poll 100 people off the street and for the vast majority of them, a more “open” mobile platform is—at best—some nebulous advantage of owning an Android phone that some dweeby family member ranted to them about. In reality, they are reality not directly making use of any of that “openness”, instead just using a worse, malware-infested iPhone alternative.
      - basch 3y ago
        An ad for the product itself is very different than an app sending a third party app as a notification. They absolutely need to enforce the latter as not ok.
      - yreg 3y ago
        Making marketing notifications a separate permission doesn't really nerf the casino games much. And I believe the "we" refers to far more people than you describe. It's ultimately a question of UX.
ubermonkey 3y ago
I don't even allow DoorDash to send notifications. They're so spammy and abusive with it that I turned them off, and just keep an eye on the app when an order pending. It's less net annoyance to me. I allow very few notifications on my phone, and nearly all the exceptions are iOS built-ins like Mail (which I still heavily restrict). Honestly, I think the only non-Apple exceptions are my VOIP softphone and Teams.
delecti 3y ago
Does iOS not have anything akin to the concept of Android's notification channels? Using Doordash as the example, at the OS level I can independently disable "General" notifications, which cuts out all the advertising spam, Delivery Status, and Payment Status. Long-pressing on an offending notification displays a button that takes you directly to the channel which that notification went through, potentially so you can disable it. With how much Android and iOS have copied from each other, that seems like fertile ground to improve the experience.
- codys 3y ago
  iOS has limited extra settings for notifications that are "time sensitive" and "direct messages", mostly to allow excluding them from notifications summaries and sending them immediately. It doesn't have the same rich/extensive notifications channel support android has. In practice, apps also abuse the channels and tag things as (at least) direct messages when they are not. Android is much better in notification config flexibility vs iOS.
- Larrikin 3y ago
  Android had a good idea that the scumbag MBAs and marketers ruined. Whenever I get a spammy notification from an app I'd prefer to not uninstall, it's always logged under a general category that is mixed in with notifications that I want. Amazon for example has channels for Alexa, account authentication, and then a notifications category.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    This tribalism is flat-out childish. A “good idea” that doesn’t stand up to adversarial actors isn’t a “good idea”. And I assure you that your developer buddies were just as complicit as the evil business-people and marketers in ruining it.
    - Larrikin 3y ago
      This is a poor argument. Don't murder is a good idea for a law even if it doesn't stop everyone. Most apps do implement channels correctly, because if they don't they get uninstalled. I've also been happy with my career. I've only had one scummy feature handed to me my first week at a job. I called out the product manager for it during a full engineering team meeting, asking him if he thought our customers were stupid, and earned a lot of good will with the other engineers for calling him on his shit. He was fired within the year, I'm still on the team, and that implementation is now gone.
ta988 3y ago
Door dash is breaking their website on purpose (pretty clear how they force hiding things when they detect them) for it to not work properly in phone browsers. This should be illegal.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  That would be absurd to legislate.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    There's tons of legislation on e.g. accessibility that is quite expensive for companies to comply with. At some point in the past, I'm sure quite a few people would have considered these expenses absurd as well. If there's a clear benefit to society, I don't think it would be an absurd regulation at all, and there's precedent for equally fine-grained/detailed regulations in many industries. Another one of that category I'd love to see: Mandate at least one secure 2FA method other than SMS-OTP.
gumby 3y ago
You can do this with a custom "focus" which allows you to block notifications from specific apps (or make an allow list which is probably not what you want). Then you use that focus by default most of the time. Unfortunately I don't know how to do the same with notifications that are sent via SMS.
- pimlottc 3y ago
  You could invert it and make a focus for “I’m expecting a delivery soon”, with a whitelist of delivery/service apps. And with Shortcuts, you could create a script to turn it off after a set amount of time.

function_seven 3y ago

My feature request for iOS: Allow me to disable notifications from an app unless I have opened it within the last X hours. I’d set it to a couple hours. My food apps could then tell me the order is ready, but can’t spam me with “Special Offers For You” days later. Maybe I can do this with an automation?

fennecfoxy 3y ago
Or just fix the root problem so that the notification is just a notification and not a way to harvest data, I guess.
ubermonkey 3y ago
I'd LOVE this. I also want something else that I wonder if I could dummy up myself. I want to change certain phone behaviors based on whether or not a given Bluetooth device is connected. My use case is "when I'm on my motorcycle, connected to headset audio, I want (a) the phone to read me texts and (b) to turn on navigation audio." I do not want either of these things UNLESS I'm on the motorcycle with the Cardo turned on.
- acosmism 3y ago
  it might be possible to get this together using apple's "shortcuts" app
  - ubermonkey 3y ago
    No hooks for what I want there, sadly.
piva00 3y ago
Seconding that I'd love this. At the same time, has App Store's guidelines/rules changed to allow spammy ads notifications? It used to be 100% disallowed and I worked for a company that got an app denied because of it until changed, nowadays it seems to just be completely common. I fucking hate it.
- yreg 3y ago
  Yeah, Apple should properly write/enforce App Store rules on this. Make marketing notification a separate permission if necessary and be strict about it. After all, topics like this are why we succumb to their curation and App Store monopoly instead of using more open devices.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    Apple with its current incentives will never do this. I’m sure they know quite well which % of their services revenue comes from enticing push notifications from casino games. But with all that said, don’t kid yourself with any thoughts that the “we” in your sentence refers to anything more than a practically immaterially small contingent of nerds. Poll 100 people off the street and for the vast majority of them, a more “open” mobile platform is—at best—some nebulous advantage of owning an Android phone that some dweeby family member ranted to them about. In reality, they are reality not directly making use of any of that “openness”, instead just using a worse, malware-infested iPhone alternative.
    - basch 3y ago
      An ad for the product itself is very different than an app sending a third party app as a notification. They absolutely need to enforce the latter as not ok.
    - yreg 3y ago
      Making marketing notifications a separate permission doesn't really nerf the casino games much. And I believe the "we" refers to far more people than you describe. It's ultimately a question of UX.

ubermonkey 3y ago

I don't even allow DoorDash to send notifications. They're so spammy and abusive with it that I turned them off, and just keep an eye on the app when an order pending. It's less net annoyance to me. I allow very few notifications on my phone, and nearly all the exceptions are iOS built-ins like Mail (which I still heavily restrict). Honestly, I think the only non-Apple exceptions are my VOIP softphone and Teams.

delecti 3y ago

Does iOS not have anything akin to the concept of Android's notification channels? Using Doordash as the example, at the OS level I can independently disable "General" notifications, which cuts out all the advertising spam, Delivery Status, and Payment Status. Long-pressing on an offending notification displays a button that takes you directly to the channel which that notification went through, potentially so you can disable it. With how much Android and iOS have copied from each other, that seems like fertile ground to improve the experience.

codys 3y ago
iOS has limited extra settings for notifications that are "time sensitive" and "direct messages", mostly to allow excluding them from notifications summaries and sending them immediately. It doesn't have the same rich/extensive notifications channel support android has. In practice, apps also abuse the channels and tag things as (at least) direct messages when they are not. Android is much better in notification config flexibility vs iOS.
Larrikin 3y ago
Android had a good idea that the scumbag MBAs and marketers ruined. Whenever I get a spammy notification from an app I'd prefer to not uninstall, it's always logged under a general category that is mixed in with notifications that I want. Amazon for example has channels for Alexa, account authentication, and then a notifications category.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  This tribalism is flat-out childish. A “good idea” that doesn’t stand up to adversarial actors isn’t a “good idea”. And I assure you that your developer buddies were just as complicit as the evil business-people and marketers in ruining it.
  - Larrikin 3y ago
    This is a poor argument. Don't murder is a good idea for a law even if it doesn't stop everyone. Most apps do implement channels correctly, because if they don't they get uninstalled. I've also been happy with my career. I've only had one scummy feature handed to me my first week at a job. I called out the product manager for it during a full engineering team meeting, asking him if he thought our customers were stupid, and earned a lot of good will with the other engineers for calling him on his shit. He was fired within the year, I'm still on the team, and that implementation is now gone.

ta988 3y ago

Door dash is breaking their website on purpose (pretty clear how they force hiding things when they detect them) for it to not work properly in phone browsers. This should be illegal.

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
That would be absurd to legislate.
- lxgr 3y ago
  There's tons of legislation on e.g. accessibility that is quite expensive for companies to comply with. At some point in the past, I'm sure quite a few people would have considered these expenses absurd as well. If there's a clear benefit to society, I don't think it would be an absurd regulation at all, and there's precedent for equally fine-grained/detailed regulations in many industries. Another one of that category I'd love to see: Mandate at least one secure 2FA method other than SMS-OTP.

gumby 3y ago

You can do this with a custom "focus" which allows you to block notifications from specific apps (or make an allow list which is probably not what you want). Then you use that focus by default most of the time. Unfortunately I don't know how to do the same with notifications that are sent via SMS.

pimlottc 3y ago
You could invert it and make a focus for “I’m expecting a delivery soon”, with a whitelist of delivery/service apps. And with Shortcuts, you could create a script to turn it off after a set amount of time.