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Rampant Abuse of Push Notifications Is Ruining Them For All Developers

316 points by dirtae 14y ago

gourneau 14y ago
TaskRabbit was abusing them as well. We should do our best to shame any organization that sends spam via push notifications.
slapshot 14y ago
That's a nice commons you've got there. It'd be a tragedy if something happened to it. As has been extensively discussed, there are lots of drawbacks to the App Store model. But if they actually enforced limits on push notifications (or maybe even charged developers for them), it'll slow the tragedy of the commons a bit. I agree that individual users could do the same, but the marginal spammy app still has every incentive to be spammy.
- Lewisham 14y ago
  Charging developers is probably going to result in the opposite of what you want: notifying the user of something useful probably monetizes far less than the spammy notifications instead. Apple just needs to get a grip and start swinging banhammers, like Facebook did with Zynga. Put troublesome apps in a probation period, where notification strings end up going through an approval process. And punish developers by holding subsequent apps up in the review process.
  - jmonegro 14y ago
    A.K.A. The Cobra Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
phil 14y ago
Just tap Don't Allow. Edit: More seriously, all four of those suggestions are very good, and I'd like to see them too. For #4, a deep link to the app's notification settings would be good enough, and probably more likely than getting a notification settings controller in UIKit.
- Firehed 14y ago
  The point is that this kind of notification spam causes users to do just that, and it's having a negative impact on apps that use push notifications appropriately.
- estel 14y ago
  Isn't that the point of the OP? Apps that are increasingly abusing push notifications means that users are increasingly just choosing "Don't Allow" even when push notifications are a key part of a non-spammy app, because they're wary of later being spammed.
- schnelle 14y ago
  Local Notifications are not disabled with the "Don't Allow" settings. I had to delete Diamond Dash after it sent me one too many notifications at 4 am.
bstar77 14y ago
The one that's been killing me lately are the notifications from the new He-Man game for iPhone. I have yet to figure out how to turn off push notifications for this app, it's not in the in-game settings or in the Settings app and I know I never enabled them in any dialogs. I just randomly get random messages about how I'm not doing a good enough job saving Eternia. If I can't figure this out soon the game is gone. Isn't this the kind of abuse that the app store approval process should be addressing? If notifications are supported, then they should be required to be configurable in the Settings app, no exceptions.
- jefflinwood 14y ago
  They might be local notifications from the app itself, not remote push notifications.
  - bstar77 14y ago
    but then wouldn't they only show when the app is running? I get these notifications all the time, even when the app is not suspended.
    - gte910h 14y ago
      No, they happen locally on your phone, at a later time.
  - idunno246 14y ago
    And there is no way to turn these off. The app just has to schedule them while its running.
    - comex 14y ago
      If you care enough, I suggest filing a radar.
btilly 14y ago
The right solution is to have every single push notification have a "Silence this" link on it. That takes you to a screen naming the app and asking if you want to turn off its ability to do push notifications. This fact is tracked across users. Add a warning from Apple that any app that is turned off by too many people will be deemed to be too spammy, and taken out of the app store. This would completely solve the problem. In the absence of any such mechanism, all incentives point towards continued abuse of the feature.
- chrisdevereux 14y ago
  Had the same thought. It's an annoying additional piece of information on each notification, but considerably less annoying than them being abused. Also the risk of false positives. It'd be possible for an app to have a high rate of disabling push notifications, but not be genuinely spammy. Edit: not be genuinely spammy
zaidf 14y ago
Same is also true for facebook notifications. I recently got a notification that said "Blabla has given you a free movie on Flixster." Now, I am actually down to try a service that gives me a free movie rental. But because of my past experience with fb notifications, I immediately hit 'Ignore' thinking it was another gimmicky spam. Facebook has focused so much at Games that I think it will begin to hurt them when more well-known businesses in other categories try to use their platform to distribute offers.
nostromo 14y ago
I wish spam prevention was a bigger part of Apple's culture. I get spam robocalls on my iPhone and have no way to block them. I have recently started getting unblockable requests to Facetime with strangers on my Mac -- a service I didn't even know I was logged into. I have an Apple email address that is way behind Gmail on spam prevention. And as noted in the article, iOS notification spam is now an issue. In contrast, Google has anti-spam as a core corporate competency. They know that where there is a profit motive, there will be spam. They truly think like hackers -- "if I were a bad actor, how would I abuse this feature?" Apple needs to pick this up.
- spartango 14y ago
  I wonder if internally, Google has recognized a business value-prop for fighting spam: One might argue that by combating spam and noisy advertising, Google makes its own advertising less likely to get ignored (lumped in with the spam), and thus higher value. Obviously this is a simplistic perspective, but perhaps there's some version of it that makes Google more incentivized to fight spam than Apple might be. Apple is incentivized by a "what makes for the best user experience" which has a more nebulous set of criteria.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    Actually gmail was competing with HotMail/AOLMail and the biggest single thing that would get people to switch was 'better spam control.' All you need to do is to tell a bunch of really smart engineers, "Here is this hugely important problem to solve, you probably aren't smart enough to solve it but we'll listen to what you have to say." And you get every engineer spending their 20% time burning first through the 'easy' fixes which don't actually work and then on to more 'interesting' fixes that kinda do, and finally some real puzzle masters doing things you would not expect but actually nail a lot of spam. And after you've done that then you have a number of people who really get a kick out of this sort of intellectual battle of wits, and you pull them together and make them the 'spam team'. Voila' achievement unlocked.
    - jusben1369 14y ago
cousin_it 14y ago
This, and the crapware problem on Windows, seem like two instances of the same underlying problem. What could a general solution look like?
- count 14y ago
  Not buying/installing shitty apps by low rent developers or companys that have poor reputations?
  - tomflack 14y ago
    Crapware is predominantly a problem on new PCs, where the vast majority of the population just goes along with it. It needs a strong stand from Microsoft.
mamoswined 14y ago
The most hilarious one on my phone is a local transit app, which is sadly very useful so I'm keeping it, with an irate developer who uses push notifications to angrily respond to negative reviews in the App store. I get notifications like "Response to Gregory's negative review." I actually read them sometimes because they are mildly amusing things like "Gregory's Review: 1/5 stars, didn't work. Developer comments: HOW ABOUT FILING A REAL BUG REPORT SO I CAN HELP YOU INSTEAD OF LEAVING A VAGUE BAD REVIEW."
- MichaelApproved 14y ago
  That's tragically funny but it shows another problem with the app store. Years after the app store has been released, Apple hasn't solved a basic need for support and bug tracking. It would be an big help the community (both customer and developer) to give them a transparent and easy way to communicate issues with each other. Does anyone know if this has been addressed in anyway with Apple saying they are considering it or not?
  - rhizome 14y ago
    How about app developers add a menu/settings item entitled something like "Find a bug?" that links to or facilitates the developer's own bug tracker?
    - duskwuff 14y ago
      How about Apple adds a "Support" link to every application listing, which developers can populate with a URL to their preferred issue tracking system? Oh wait -- they do! It's just a shame that most developers don't put anything really useful in there.:(
      - rhizome 14y ago
        Ah! Not being an IOS dev (or owner) I had no idea. What is the typically-wrong use of it? Could it be simply that the word "Support" is a bad one to use for most people? Can it be changed to "Help?" Anybody can feel free to contact me about this via my profile here, I'd truly be interested in making this flow easier and I know how to write this stuff.
kylelibra 14y ago
At the very least they should ban apps that have a way where no matter how many times you check it, the icon always has the little (1) on it. GetGlue was doing this for a while, but it appears they stopped.
- jobu 14y ago
  That always irked me too. Now you can disable those little app notification badges in settings.
rm999 14y ago
I remember the day Draw Something started abusing push notifications: the paid version was sending me ads for other zynga games. What sucks is push notifications are almost essential for the functionality of the game: without them, you have to constantly check if it's your turn. I and many other people deleted the app as soon as the ads showed up. Talk about destroying a very valuable network effect for a quick profit-grab. I'm now part of that group who reflexively rejects notification requests. I agree with this article that Apple should take action, but app makers should also realize the cost of abusing their customers.
- danielweber 14y ago
  And this is why users don't want to upgrade: the upgrade may be less valuable but out to monetize you. So we developers can't get rid of our broken stuff because people are afraid to upgrade.
SquareWheel 14y ago
The same is true of in-app purchases. How many scammy "buy 3000 mojo points!" apps are out there now? At this point I don't even bother with an app if I see in-app purchases. Shame for those who use them correctly, like Alien Blue.
- duskwuff 14y ago
  Perhaps it'd be useful if Apple would make a distinction between applications with one-time IAPs (e.g, "upgrade to SurfWriter Plus for $1.99") and applications with consumable IAPs (e.g, "get ten thousand zorkberries for $1.99"). The latter are almost certainly the sort of IAPs that are fundamentally bothering you here.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
For all the weird ad/spam accusations I've heard against Android, it shocks me how much this seems to be an iOS issue. I can say I've never, ever had a problem with this in Android, and if I did, most every app that I use that I can think of allows me to enabled/disable different types of notifications (FB/Twitter/etc). It's also a tiny bit amusing that one of the solutions is to make the Settings more sane and make them live inside their application like Android.
- nollidge 14y ago
  I wonder if it's a UX difference. I don't use iOS, but looking at those notifications, they seem obtrusive and demanding of your attention. Whereas in Android, the notifications just accumulate in the tray at the top without really getting in the way.
  - Symmetry 14y ago
    But even given that Android notification SPAM would be less annoying than iOS notification SPAM seems to be, why don't I ever see sketchy Android apps even trying that? Am I just not downloading apps from the wrong places?
    - na85 14y ago
      Why do you capitalize "spam"?
    - drivebyacct2 14y ago
      There was a company for a while that was trying to do that. People exploded with anger (number one, it was hard to identify what app was the cause, number two, it was as annoying as it much be for iOS users). Almost all apps removed it, the company changed strategy if I recall and Google threatened to ban their apps. But other than one Zynga game, I never, ever get spam notifications and that Zynga game was installed for about an hour or two.
    - chimeracoder 14y ago
      AirPush was one company that did (does?) sell ads as Android push notifications. On the whole, they're really not that widely used anymore, though - partly because Android users pushed back hard against them about a year ago, IIRC, but also because the newest version or two of Android makes it really easy to identify the offending app and disable the notifications. If I remember correctly, the pushback was before the new notification tray, so it may have been Android's own response to the problem.
jeffclark 14y ago
"As a result, users are starting to reflexively reject app requests to send push notifications." Source? An actual, non-vague stat? Proof?
chrisdevereux 14y ago
Would a simple "stop showing me these" on each notification work?
rsl7 14y ago
I hate all notifications except my morning alarm clock. I don't want to be interrupted.
marknutter 14y ago
I rarely allow apps to send me push notifications. Only very selectively do I allow it and even then my patience is short. For the average user this may be an issue but I've found my approach handles the situation very nicely.
dsl 14y ago
The Instacart notifications are just insane. I got into the early beta and never used the app a single time because of the sheer volume of annoying pushes I'd get.
zobzu 14y ago
Those notifications are the "fucking horror". I uninstall any app (on Android, mind you) that does that. heck, i even dislike the notifications when the app is on the foreground (specially the apps begging for rating on the market: when i get one, i just go put one star). but the background ones are TRUE EVIL. :P
- MikeKusold 14y ago
  I have no issues with an app asking me ONCE (unless I press `later`) for a ranking. The fact of the matter is that once I install an app, I'm going to forget about the fact that it came from the Play Store and I'm just going to use it. If it weren't for those pop-ups, I would only ever write reviews when an app pissed me off.
frankus 14y ago
As mentioned before, Local Notifications can be equally spammy, are impossible to turn off, and are visually indistinguishable from push notifications. The are also not subject to a strict interpretation of the app review guidelines. The only limitation is that they need to be set ahead of time when the app is active, or triggered by one of the background modes (geofencing, significant location change, task completion, Bluetooth LE, etc.)
rossjudson 14y ago
Apple needs to start engaging in Pagerank-style ranking of applications in the store, and including metrics like "number of push notifications sent, per user" in the calculation. Please also include "number of applications per developer". And please revise the guidelines such that if in-app purchases are turned off on the phone, showing the user a catalog or purchases screen is grounds for rejection.
lazyjones 14y ago
First reaction to this: "Wow, that must be annoying, I'm glad I don't have these apps. What were the developers thinking, how do they get away with these shady practices?" Second reaction: "Perhaps they are doing something right and we should be doing that in our apps. Perhaps younger people actually like such things, after all they get dozens of sms every day and it makes them feel important/liked?"
boctor 14y ago
OK, so there is gratuitous use of push notifications, but it's also unfair to compare push usage between a utility app and apps that are trying to convince you to try something new. How about we compare the pushes to email campaigns by companies? I for one am constantly amazed at how much users tolerate these emails. So I say, yes, make it easier to stop the pushes just like it's easy to unsubscribe from email campaigns. It could be as easy as making sure users know that the pushes stop when the app is uninstalled. But I think outside of other app developers and the tech community, users may not feel as strongly that this is abuse.
S_A_P 14y ago
The same goes for Notification bubbles!!!!!! I have deleted some games from my system because they display notification bubbles above the icon or app folder. That drives me insane. A few examples I can call out are Halfbrick studios. Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja both do this too often for my taste and have been removed from my phone because of it. These are particularly bad examples because of how many taps it takes to actually show and clear the notification. I wish there was an opt out with these things as it disturbs my OCD to have a clean desktop and no notification bubbles.
- ghewgill 14y ago
  But... you can disable those. They are called "Badges". Turn off the "Badge App Icon" option in the notification settings for the app in question.
  - Groxx 14y ago
    Which requires knowing those settings exist, and finding them for the one app in 100+ that some people have in one giant list with no search. That's part of the complaint - turning them off is unintuitive and just plain bad.
  - 3JPLW 14y ago
    Not all Badges are moderated through the notification center. Doodle Jump is one such app that manages to sneak badges past it -- they're not push notifications, but are populated upon application close.
kmfrk 14y ago
I can't for the life of me figure out how to disable Embark NYC's push notification. My biggest problem now, however, is getting push notifications from Letterpress at 4AM, because the person I play with is on the other side of the continent. There should be an adittional setting to require permission for a specified window of time like, say, 1AM to 8AM.
raldi 14y ago
I recently had to disable notifications for Words With Friends (it took two tries). The "nudges" were bad enough (I'll make my move when I have some free time, damn it) but the final straw was when they started holiday spam -- e.g., "Why not celebrate Halloween by playing a word like SPOOKY, WITCH, or DRACULA?" No, fuck you, Zynga. And Dracula shouldn't even be a playable word.
mikeash 14y ago
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is intentional. A big problem with computer security is that people just blindly click "OK" to any sort of authorization prompt. Ever since push notification abuse started to get bad, I've been much more careful about reading the authorization prompts that my phone throws up, after authorizing some apps for push notifications without thinking through the implications, then having to manually turn them off later.
xoail 14y ago
May be developers should provide the frequency (x) of push notifications at the time of requesting access. And Apple should ensure not more than x notifications were sent to a device? Something along the lines: XYZ App would like to send you push notifications. Freq: 2/day, 1/week, User set [Allow] [Deny].
caycep 14y ago
i generally say no to notifications. I don't have anything mission critical on email that I need to know "right this second" and twitter and fb updates I only want when I want them, otherwise they're a huge distraction..
grandalf 14y ago
I don't think there are really any good reasons to use push notifications. I have them disabled on all the apps I install and don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
flurp 14y ago
I've been calling Facebook Notifications the Push Notification of the Web, they are great, maybe just as good as native Push Notifications. But they have also "solved" (it's new and yet to see) the spam problem recently by implementing harsh restrictions on how you as a developer can send them. It would be interesting if Apple and Google copied this behavior. Basically Apps that send > 50000 notifications a week have to maintain a 17% Click-To-Impression ratio. However I find the 50K an oddly picked number which should instead be based on installed user base.
jdavid 14y ago
I think this could be solved with a simple like/dislike button for notifications. If that type of notification is unwanted you could, dislike it and it would suppress notifications of that type for ... x days. If you do it enough, it would disable it. If enough of the apps notifications are disliked then the apps notification privileges get suspended all together.
zerostar07 14y ago
Facebook apps went through the same problems years ago. I don't think facebook ever managed to settle on a solution.
krickle 14y ago
This is the number one reason I find my iPhone irritating (in practice) -- apps keep abusing even local notifications and those should be off by default unless I allow it.
Wistar 14y ago
First thing I turn off on all apps. If, after a spell, I find that I miss push notifications on a given app, then I will turn it on.
ck2 14y ago
What I love on android is I can just strike-through any privilege I don't want an app to have, like internet access. This might be a cyanogenmod-only feature though.
hamstergene 14y ago
They should take Growl's approach of forcing developers to declare all possible notifications that an app can send, so that they could examine their texts and purposes during review process. It would also grant a possibility for a user to enable/disable notifications individually.
doyouevenlift 14y ago
What a shit blog post. Don't give permissions to apps for push if they don't need it. And don't install crap. Oh I forgot the mothership needs to protect you...
priyanka_sri 14y ago
I am not for "Provide a feedback mechanism that allows users to report spammy notifications, and crack down on abusive apps." because 'what is' spam is highly subjective, and this can be used against the App to bring down even genuine Apps! I wouldn't agree that we can let the iPhone user remain ignorant of what is all this about Push Notifications! If the user bought the iPhone, if the user 'chose to' install the App, then it falls upon the user to learn how to use it! Is it not? When we buy, say, a new electronic equipment, say a new refrigerator, is it not upon us to learn about how to use it controls?

316 points by dirtae 14y ago

TaskRabbit was abusing them as well. We should do our best to shame any organization that sends spam via push notifications.

slapshot 14y ago

That's a nice commons you've got there. It'd be a tragedy if something happened to it. As has been extensively discussed, there are lots of drawbacks to the App Store model. But if they actually enforced limits on push notifications (or maybe even charged developers for them), it'll slow the tragedy of the commons a bit. I agree that individual users could do the same, but the marginal spammy app still has every incentive to be spammy.

Lewisham 14y ago
Charging developers is probably going to result in the opposite of what you want: notifying the user of something useful probably monetizes far less than the spammy notifications instead. Apple just needs to get a grip and start swinging banhammers, like Facebook did with Zynga. Put troublesome apps in a probation period, where notification strings end up going through an approval process. And punish developers by holding subsequent apps up in the review process.
- jmonegro 14y ago
  A.K.A. The Cobra Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

phil 14y ago

Just tap Don't Allow. Edit: More seriously, all four of those suggestions are very good, and I'd like to see them too. For #4, a deep link to the app's notification settings would be good enough, and probably more likely than getting a notification settings controller in UIKit.

Firehed 14y ago
The point is that this kind of notification spam causes users to do just that, and it's having a negative impact on apps that use push notifications appropriately.
estel 14y ago
Isn't that the point of the OP? Apps that are increasingly abusing push notifications means that users are increasingly just choosing "Don't Allow" even when push notifications are a key part of a non-spammy app, because they're wary of later being spammed.
schnelle 14y ago
Local Notifications are not disabled with the "Don't Allow" settings. I had to delete Diamond Dash after it sent me one too many notifications at 4 am.

bstar77 14y ago

The one that's been killing me lately are the notifications from the new He-Man game for iPhone. I have yet to figure out how to turn off push notifications for this app, it's not in the in-game settings or in the Settings app and I know I never enabled them in any dialogs. I just randomly get random messages about how I'm not doing a good enough job saving Eternia. If I can't figure this out soon the game is gone. Isn't this the kind of abuse that the app store approval process should be addressing? If notifications are supported, then they should be required to be configurable in the Settings app, no exceptions.

jefflinwood 14y ago
They might be local notifications from the app itself, not remote push notifications.
- bstar77 14y ago
  but then wouldn't they only show when the app is running? I get these notifications all the time, even when the app is not suspended.
  - gte910h 14y ago
    No, they happen locally on your phone, at a later time.
- idunno246 14y ago
  And there is no way to turn these off. The app just has to schedule them while its running.
  - comex 14y ago
    If you care enough, I suggest filing a radar.

btilly 14y ago

The right solution is to have every single push notification have a "Silence this" link on it. That takes you to a screen naming the app and asking if you want to turn off its ability to do push notifications. This fact is tracked across users. Add a warning from Apple that any app that is turned off by too many people will be deemed to be too spammy, and taken out of the app store. This would completely solve the problem. In the absence of any such mechanism, all incentives point towards continued abuse of the feature.

chrisdevereux 14y ago
Had the same thought. It's an annoying additional piece of information on each notification, but considerably less annoying than them being abused. Also the risk of false positives. It'd be possible for an app to have a high rate of disabling push notifications, but not be genuinely spammy. Edit: not be genuinely spammy

zaidf 14y ago

Same is also true for facebook notifications. I recently got a notification that said "Blabla has given you a free movie on Flixster." Now, I am actually down to try a service that gives me a free movie rental. But because of my past experience with fb notifications, I immediately hit 'Ignore' thinking it was another gimmicky spam. Facebook has focused so much at Games that I think it will begin to hurt them when more well-known businesses in other categories try to use their platform to distribute offers.

nostromo 14y ago

I wish spam prevention was a bigger part of Apple's culture. I get spam robocalls on my iPhone and have no way to block them. I have recently started getting unblockable requests to Facetime with strangers on my Mac -- a service I didn't even know I was logged into. I have an Apple email address that is way behind Gmail on spam prevention. And as noted in the article, iOS notification spam is now an issue. In contrast, Google has anti-spam as a core corporate competency. They know that where there is a profit motive, there will be spam. They truly think like hackers -- "if I were a bad actor, how would I abuse this feature?" Apple needs to pick this up.

spartango 14y ago
I wonder if internally, Google has recognized a business value-prop for fighting spam: One might argue that by combating spam and noisy advertising, Google makes its own advertising less likely to get ignored (lumped in with the spam), and thus higher value. Obviously this is a simplistic perspective, but perhaps there's some version of it that makes Google more incentivized to fight spam than Apple might be. Apple is incentivized by a "what makes for the best user experience" which has a more nebulous set of criteria.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Actually gmail was competing with HotMail/AOLMail and the biggest single thing that would get people to switch was 'better spam control.' All you need to do is to tell a bunch of really smart engineers, "Here is this hugely important problem to solve, you probably aren't smart enough to solve it but we'll listen to what you have to say." And you get every engineer spending their 20% time burning first through the 'easy' fixes which don't actually work and then on to more 'interesting' fixes that kinda do, and finally some real puzzle masters doing things you would not expect but actually nail a lot of spam. And after you've done that then you have a number of people who really get a kick out of this sort of intellectual battle of wits, and you pull them together and make them the 'spam team'. Voila' achievement unlocked.
  - jusben1369 14y ago

cousin_it 14y ago

This, and the crapware problem on Windows, seem like two instances of the same underlying problem. What could a general solution look like?

count 14y ago
Not buying/installing shitty apps by low rent developers or companys that have poor reputations?
- tomflack 14y ago
  Crapware is predominantly a problem on new PCs, where the vast majority of the population just goes along with it. It needs a strong stand from Microsoft.

mamoswined 14y ago

The most hilarious one on my phone is a local transit app, which is sadly very useful so I'm keeping it, with an irate developer who uses push notifications to angrily respond to negative reviews in the App store. I get notifications like "Response to Gregory's negative review." I actually read them sometimes because they are mildly amusing things like "Gregory's Review: 1/5 stars, didn't work. Developer comments: HOW ABOUT FILING A REAL BUG REPORT SO I CAN HELP YOU INSTEAD OF LEAVING A VAGUE BAD REVIEW."

MichaelApproved 14y ago
That's tragically funny but it shows another problem with the app store. Years after the app store has been released, Apple hasn't solved a basic need for support and bug tracking. It would be an big help the community (both customer and developer) to give them a transparent and easy way to communicate issues with each other. Does anyone know if this has been addressed in anyway with Apple saying they are considering it or not?
- rhizome 14y ago
  How about app developers add a menu/settings item entitled something like "Find a bug?" that links to or facilitates the developer's own bug tracker?
  - duskwuff 14y ago
    How about Apple adds a "Support" link to every application listing, which developers can populate with a URL to their preferred issue tracking system? Oh wait -- they do! It's just a shame that most developers don't put anything really useful in there.:(
    - rhizome 14y ago
      Ah! Not being an IOS dev (or owner) I had no idea. What is the typically-wrong use of it? Could it be simply that the word "Support" is a bad one to use for most people? Can it be changed to "Help?" Anybody can feel free to contact me about this via my profile here, I'd truly be interested in making this flow easier and I know how to write this stuff.

kylelibra 14y ago

At the very least they should ban apps that have a way where no matter how many times you check it, the icon always has the little (1) on it. GetGlue was doing this for a while, but it appears they stopped.

jobu 14y ago
That always irked me too. Now you can disable those little app notification badges in settings.

rm999 14y ago

I remember the day Draw Something started abusing push notifications: the paid version was sending me ads for other zynga games. What sucks is push notifications are almost essential for the functionality of the game: without them, you have to constantly check if it's your turn. I and many other people deleted the app as soon as the ads showed up. Talk about destroying a very valuable network effect for a quick profit-grab. I'm now part of that group who reflexively rejects notification requests. I agree with this article that Apple should take action, but app makers should also realize the cost of abusing their customers.

danielweber 14y ago
And this is why users don't want to upgrade: the upgrade may be less valuable but out to monetize you. So we developers can't get rid of our broken stuff because people are afraid to upgrade.

SquareWheel 14y ago

The same is true of in-app purchases. How many scammy "buy 3000 mojo points!" apps are out there now? At this point I don't even bother with an app if I see in-app purchases. Shame for those who use them correctly, like Alien Blue.

duskwuff 14y ago
Perhaps it'd be useful if Apple would make a distinction between applications with one-time IAPs (e.g, "upgrade to SurfWriter Plus for $1.99") and applications with consumable IAPs (e.g, "get ten thousand zorkberries for $1.99"). The latter are almost certainly the sort of IAPs that are fundamentally bothering you here.

drivebyacct2 14y ago

For all the weird ad/spam accusations I've heard against Android, it shocks me how much this seems to be an iOS issue. I can say I've never, ever had a problem with this in Android, and if I did, most every app that I use that I can think of allows me to enabled/disable different types of notifications (FB/Twitter/etc). It's also a tiny bit amusing that one of the solutions is to make the Settings more sane and make them live inside their application like Android.

nollidge 14y ago
I wonder if it's a UX difference. I don't use iOS, but looking at those notifications, they seem obtrusive and demanding of your attention. Whereas in Android, the notifications just accumulate in the tray at the top without really getting in the way.
- Symmetry 14y ago
  But even given that Android notification SPAM would be less annoying than iOS notification SPAM seems to be, why don't I ever see sketchy Android apps even trying that? Am I just not downloading apps from the wrong places?
  - na85 14y ago
    Why do you capitalize "spam"?
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    There was a company for a while that was trying to do that. People exploded with anger (number one, it was hard to identify what app was the cause, number two, it was as annoying as it much be for iOS users). Almost all apps removed it, the company changed strategy if I recall and Google threatened to ban their apps. But other than one Zynga game, I never, ever get spam notifications and that Zynga game was installed for about an hour or two.
  - chimeracoder 14y ago
    AirPush was one company that did (does?) sell ads as Android push notifications. On the whole, they're really not that widely used anymore, though - partly because Android users pushed back hard against them about a year ago, IIRC, but also because the newest version or two of Android makes it really easy to identify the offending app and disable the notifications. If I remember correctly, the pushback was before the new notification tray, so it may have been Android's own response to the problem.

jeffclark 14y ago

"As a result, users are starting to reflexively reject app requests to send push notifications." Source? An actual, non-vague stat? Proof?

chrisdevereux 14y ago

Would a simple "stop showing me these" on each notification work?

rsl7 14y ago

I hate all notifications except my morning alarm clock. I don't want to be interrupted.

marknutter 14y ago

I rarely allow apps to send me push notifications. Only very selectively do I allow it and even then my patience is short. For the average user this may be an issue but I've found my approach handles the situation very nicely.

dsl 14y ago

The Instacart notifications are just insane. I got into the early beta and never used the app a single time because of the sheer volume of annoying pushes I'd get.

zobzu 14y ago

Those notifications are the "fucking horror". I uninstall any app (on Android, mind you) that does that. heck, i even dislike the notifications when the app is on the foreground (specially the apps begging for rating on the market: when i get one, i just go put one star). but the background ones are TRUE EVIL. :P

MikeKusold 14y ago
I have no issues with an app asking me ONCE (unless I press `later`) for a ranking. The fact of the matter is that once I install an app, I'm going to forget about the fact that it came from the Play Store and I'm just going to use it. If it weren't for those pop-ups, I would only ever write reviews when an app pissed me off.

frankus 14y ago

As mentioned before, Local Notifications can be equally spammy, are impossible to turn off, and are visually indistinguishable from push notifications. The are also not subject to a strict interpretation of the app review guidelines. The only limitation is that they need to be set ahead of time when the app is active, or triggered by one of the background modes (geofencing, significant location change, task completion, Bluetooth LE, etc.)

rossjudson 14y ago

Apple needs to start engaging in Pagerank-style ranking of applications in the store, and including metrics like "number of push notifications sent, per user" in the calculation. Please also include "number of applications per developer". And please revise the guidelines such that if in-app purchases are turned off on the phone, showing the user a catalog or purchases screen is grounds for rejection.

lazyjones 14y ago

First reaction to this: "Wow, that must be annoying, I'm glad I don't have these apps. What were the developers thinking, how do they get away with these shady practices?" Second reaction: "Perhaps they are doing something right and we should be doing that in our apps. Perhaps younger people actually like such things, after all they get dozens of sms every day and it makes them feel important/liked?"

boctor 14y ago

OK, so there is gratuitous use of push notifications, but it's also unfair to compare push usage between a utility app and apps that are trying to convince you to try something new. How about we compare the pushes to email campaigns by companies? I for one am constantly amazed at how much users tolerate these emails. So I say, yes, make it easier to stop the pushes just like it's easy to unsubscribe from email campaigns. It could be as easy as making sure users know that the pushes stop when the app is uninstalled. But I think outside of other app developers and the tech community, users may not feel as strongly that this is abuse.

S_A_P 14y ago

The same goes for Notification bubbles!!!!!! I have deleted some games from my system because they display notification bubbles above the icon or app folder. That drives me insane. A few examples I can call out are Halfbrick studios. Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja both do this too often for my taste and have been removed from my phone because of it. These are particularly bad examples because of how many taps it takes to actually show and clear the notification. I wish there was an opt out with these things as it disturbs my OCD to have a clean desktop and no notification bubbles.

ghewgill 14y ago
But... you can disable those. They are called "Badges". Turn off the "Badge App Icon" option in the notification settings for the app in question.
- Groxx 14y ago
  Which requires knowing those settings exist, and finding them for the one app in 100+ that some people have in one giant list with no search. That's part of the complaint - turning them off is unintuitive and just plain bad.
- 3JPLW 14y ago
  Not all Badges are moderated through the notification center. Doodle Jump is one such app that manages to sneak badges past it -- they're not push notifications, but are populated upon application close.

kmfrk 14y ago

I can't for the life of me figure out how to disable Embark NYC's push notification. My biggest problem now, however, is getting push notifications from Letterpress at 4AM, because the person I play with is on the other side of the continent. There should be an adittional setting to require permission for a specified window of time like, say, 1AM to 8AM.

raldi 14y ago

I recently had to disable notifications for Words With Friends (it took two tries). The "nudges" were bad enough (I'll make my move when I have some free time, damn it) but the final straw was when they started holiday spam -- e.g., "Why not celebrate Halloween by playing a word like SPOOKY, WITCH, or DRACULA?" No, fuck you, Zynga. And Dracula shouldn't even be a playable word.

mikeash 14y ago

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is intentional. A big problem with computer security is that people just blindly click "OK" to any sort of authorization prompt. Ever since push notification abuse started to get bad, I've been much more careful about reading the authorization prompts that my phone throws up, after authorizing some apps for push notifications without thinking through the implications, then having to manually turn them off later.

xoail 14y ago

May be developers should provide the frequency (x) of push notifications at the time of requesting access. And Apple should ensure not more than x notifications were sent to a device? Something along the lines: XYZ App would like to send you push notifications. Freq: 2/day, 1/week, User set [Allow] [Deny].

caycep 14y ago

i generally say no to notifications. I don't have anything mission critical on email that I need to know "right this second" and twitter and fb updates I only want when I want them, otherwise they're a huge distraction..

grandalf 14y ago

I don't think there are really any good reasons to use push notifications. I have them disabled on all the apps I install and don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.

flurp 14y ago

I've been calling Facebook Notifications the Push Notification of the Web, they are great, maybe just as good as native Push Notifications. But they have also "solved" (it's new and yet to see) the spam problem recently by implementing harsh restrictions on how you as a developer can send them. It would be interesting if Apple and Google copied this behavior. Basically Apps that send > 50000 notifications a week have to maintain a 17% Click-To-Impression ratio. However I find the 50K an oddly picked number which should instead be based on installed user base.

jdavid 14y ago

I think this could be solved with a simple like/dislike button for notifications. If that type of notification is unwanted you could, dislike it and it would suppress notifications of that type for ... x days. If you do it enough, it would disable it. If enough of the apps notifications are disliked then the apps notification privileges get suspended all together.

zerostar07 14y ago

Facebook apps went through the same problems years ago. I don't think facebook ever managed to settle on a solution.

krickle 14y ago

This is the number one reason I find my iPhone irritating (in practice) -- apps keep abusing even local notifications and those should be off by default unless I allow it.

Wistar 14y ago

First thing I turn off on all apps. If, after a spell, I find that I miss push notifications on a given app, then I will turn it on.

ck2 14y ago

What I love on android is I can just strike-through any privilege I don't want an app to have, like internet access. This might be a cyanogenmod-only feature though.

hamstergene 14y ago

They should take Growl's approach of forcing developers to declare all possible notifications that an app can send, so that they could examine their texts and purposes during review process. It would also grant a possibility for a user to enable/disable notifications individually.

doyouevenlift 14y ago

What a shit blog post. Don't give permissions to apps for push if they don't need it. And don't install crap. Oh I forgot the mothership needs to protect you...

priyanka_sri 14y ago

I am not for "Provide a feedback mechanism that allows users to report spammy notifications, and crack down on abusive apps." because 'what is' spam is highly subjective, and this can be used against the App to bring down even genuine Apps! I wouldn't agree that we can let the iPhone user remain ignorant of what is all this about Push Notifications! If the user bought the iPhone, if the user 'chose to' install the App, then it falls upon the user to learn how to use it! Is it not? When we buy, say, a new electronic equipment, say a new refrigerator, is it not upon us to learn about how to use it controls?