17 ms·

What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

423 points by iamacyborg 5mo ago

bigyabai 5mo ago
I'm surprised that the article is this long with zero mention of Senator Wyden's concerns vis-a-vis Google and Apple's Push Notification system: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_push_notification_surveillance_letter.pdf https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_...
- iamacyborg 5mo ago
  I’m in the UK so I don’t catch all us news, good spot though
nateguchi 5mo ago
I feel like this article reads like the author is upset that Apple + Google prevent / control certain types of notifications (read: spam) > Cross-sell, upsell, education and discovery can work on push Push notifications should only be for transactional notifications. I don't want another inbox for junk.
- Forgeties79 5mo ago
  >discovery I can’t think of a single app I want a “Discover” tab on anymore. The moment you include one is the moment there is someone trying to game it. I definitely don’t want push notifications trying to show me something new. I’m hardly lacking in distractions (Yes I am sure somebody can give me an example of a good use of Discover but you get my point)
- iamacyborg 5mo ago
  Not upset, but increasingly concerned that all channels are being intermediated by big tech.
  - supriyo-biswas 5mo ago
    Something might come of introspecting why such controls are being built and desired by consumers instead of trying to frame everything as a "big tech evil!!1" narrative.
    - iamacyborg 5mo ago
      I’d recommend following your own train of thought, why is big tech so hell bent on intermediating the experience between their users and everyone else? They’ve done it for email, web search, mobile experiences, advertising, etc. You want to use any of those things, you’ll have to pay their toll booth, figuratively or literally.
      - dodobirdlord 5mo ago
        The chain of thought is quite straightforward. Functionally nobody wants an intermediary-free channel because there are adversarial entities on the other end.
        iamacyborg 5mo ago
        Do you think that logic holds true for web search as well? Because this is happening there in a much stronger way too.
      - nyx 5mo ago
        I'm not a fan of Apple or Google, and it feels bad that all of our notifications pass through APNS or FCM. Megacorps shouldn't have control over our digital lives to the extent that they do, and anyone talking about this gets my full attention and support. Except for marketers! I don't think there's a less sympathetic category of technologists, save for maybe CSAM peddlers. You're upset that you can't get "visibility" into whether the bullshit ad you tried to ram down my throat landed on target? You're worried that I'm a dormant user and my phone will silently delete the spam you sent to try to hook me back into engaging with whatever worthless product you're hawking? World's tiniest violin, buddy. Boo fucking hoo. Your last paragraph says the "senders" (read: spammers) who make it through the next decade intact will be, to lightly paraphrase, the ones who send messages the recipients actually wanted. You say that like it's a bad thing! The computer is in my life because it is a tool that does the things I want. It is not an open mic for marketing sleazebags to try to sell me shit. May every single one of your attempts to invade my life and hijack my attention be flushed swiftly down the toilet.
- tcdent 5mo ago
  Yeah these channels used to be respected in that way. And then app developers discovered that hooks like "look what you missed" work on users and so now we all have to get them in the same category.
- baxtr 5mo ago
  Agreed. I have a doc appointment app, where I like the notifications to be on for reminders etc. Lately they started sending marketing messages through that channel. Now I’m sure it’s possible to turn off the marketing messages. But I bet most people don’t know and won’t change that. It’s super annoying.
  - iamacyborg 5mo ago
    And soon, those appointment reminders might quietly be dismissed by your phone without you being any the wiser.
    - lanerobertlane 5mo ago
      [dead]
  - whstl 5mo ago
    Same for things like Uber. I do want to know when a car is arriving. I don't want messages asking if I'm hungry.
    - warkdarrior 5mo ago
      Hi whstl, Are you hungry? Open your Uber Eats app now for 10% off. /this message sent through PalantirFinder -- from marketing and coupons to ordnance, we deliver everything!
  - TheNewsIsHere 5mo ago
    I absolutely hate medical marketing. I recently decided to switch dermatology practices over a combination of bad data management, unwelcome marketing for cosmetic dermatology products, and unsolicited SMSs. I never consented to receive marketing or texts (or to lose my data in a data breach, or to be billed for the in person services by practices other than the one from which I received services and ignored unopened as spam because I didn’t recognize the sender, etc…) But I digress.
  - no-name-here 5mo ago
- thisislife2 5mo ago
  That's not entirely fair to the author as the article also states that the consumer being in control is a must: > Every step subtracts a degree of sender control. Some of it passes to the user, and that is a good thing: a person deciding what is allowed to interrupt them is the channel working as it should. The rest passes to the platform, and that is the part that should concern a sender, because the platform's judgment is opaque, unappealable, and increasingly made by a model rather than by a setting the user chose. A platform has essentially two "clients" - the user and the developer. Without both, it wouldn't exist. And it is in the interest of both that the platform should have very limited arbitrary authority over them. Nobody can deny today that the platform owners today have too much power over their users and their developers, which makes it easy for them to commercially exploit them while undermining their rights. We need regulations and standards (for interoperability, which is one of the arguments being made) to counter this.
  - refulgentis 5mo ago
    Been an app developer since 2009, worked on Android for 6 years at Google. Push notifications suck, users hate them. Simultaneously, I cannot match the pull quote, an argument summary, to their argumentation. IIUC if the reword patent / Apple’s summarizing disappear there’s 0 reason to say it wasn’t control passing purely to the consumer. So I’m left a bit empty as the high-minded purpose has little backing, and thus comes across as bloviating.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
  > (read: spam) is it unironically incomprehensible to you that the owner of the device should in the one who gets to decide what is and isn't spam? it's not email where you can get bombarded with shit from any random server - you can mute or uninstall an app.
  - whstl 5mo ago
    It should but apps don't let us decide. An intermediate seems to be trying to fix it. Is it ideal? No. But it's the spammers who are to blame.
    - b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
      like I said, you decide by muting or removing the offending app.
      - whstl 5mo ago
        Fine, but that’s was clearly not enough to stop the spam, nor it was enough to satisfy everyone. There are some apps I can’t afford to mute or uninstall, such as phone, transportation, communication and work. I wish I could, but I currently can’t, I’m not privileged enough. “Punishment by Apple” in this instance is somehow the only response anyone had to misbehaving companies.
    - TheNewsIsHere 5mo ago
      You know, I would love a feature that lets me mark push notifications as spam, and optionally send them to Apple. The last part is important for a variety of reasons, one of which is that notifications can be end to end encrypted. Spam filter push notifications. Ideally enough spam reports for Uber Eat’s constant marketing abuse and they lose APNs access for the Bundle ID associated with the spam reports. For example.
      - nickf 5mo ago
        You’re right of course, but Apple won’t do it - they’re happily running a two-tier system where Uber, eBay, Doordash can force spam notifications on you with impunity. All my settings for marketing are off - eBay still sends me notifications about coupons (and additionally there’s no way to actually contact them to complain, of course). Doordash won’t let me get delivery notifications without marketing notifications. Apple could fully enforce their policies and fix this in a heartbeat, but they won’t.
- hithre 5mo ago
  Depends. Blackberry 10 hub was strongly designed as a shared inbox instead of a loose system of notification like ios or android. And it was awesome.
- ghostly_s 5mo ago
  The "you" in the title's reference to "your push notifications" is not the user, it is the marketer. That tells you everything you need to know about the value of this piece.
- lukeschlather 5mo ago
  I've definitely had notifications I consider spam direct from Google before. Apple/Google are not trustworthy.
- EZ-E 5mo ago
  I wish Apple would force app developers to implement different "channels" for promotional notifications vs transactional - so that you can pick and choose which ones you want.
  - mycall 5mo ago
    In-app notifications settings should do this if they are trustworthy.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
toomuchtodo 5mo ago
Push notifications are for the user, not the marketer. From the author's blog: "I do Revenue Operation, helping Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams with data, process and technology."
- iamacyborg 5mo ago
  You think there might be some sort of interaction between both facets there? How is bad summarisation good for a user, for example?
  - TheNewsIsHere 5mo ago
    Probably depends on the user. Along with push notifications for almost every app on every one of my devices, I disable the summarization. For me the notification is the point, and the point of notifications to me is that they deserve my attention. Of the vanishingly few apps I install these days, almost nothing can say it deserves my attention. Even my bank doesn’t get those privileges.
    - iamacyborg 5mo ago
      I largely do the same, and keep my phone on dnd mode.
  - nickburns 5mo ago
    > You think there might be some sort of interaction between both facets there? With the exception of one trying to extract currency from the other, in exchange for something of dubious value—no.
  - AlexandrB 5mo ago
    The interaction is: marketers keep trying to abuse these systems and platform owners and users keep having to find ways to fight them off. Some of these efforts have unfortunate downstream consequences (like bad summaries).
balderdash 5mo ago
I wish apple/google would implement better notification control - like the ability to turn off all marketing notifications, and a much better digest format
- iamacyborg 5mo ago
  That would be nice. I wouldn’t be surprised, as on-phone models get more capable, if we don’t see them start to build an “inbox” like we see with email where you can then start seeing much more heavy processing happening.
  - gumby271 5mo ago
    I think that's what the Notification Organizer on Android (maybe Pixel exclusive, not sure) does. It's sorting notifications into broad categories using AI and groups them in the notification shade.
    - iamacyborg 5mo ago
      Makes sense, Google definitely have a lot more experience in that space with gmail than Apple do.
- tencentshill 5mo ago
  Notification Channels is the official way to do this on Android, but it's up to the app developer to categorize them properly. They have no incentive to allow you to turn off ads.
  - aag 5mo ago
    Actually, they do have an incentive to let you turn off ads. If they don't, many users will turn off notifications entirely. At least if they categorize them, some users will just turn off the bothersome ones.
    - orrito 5mo ago
toast0 5mo ago
> For most of the channel's history they did very little of it visibly. The architecture was permissive of intervention; they simply chose not to intervene much. That restraint is what ended. I guess it wasn't always visible, but they were intervening in some for or another since the beginning. At WhatsApp, push delay/suppression/coalescing was something we were always monitoring, and IIRC, it was part of the system since at least when I joined in 2011. If you don't work within the system, your users' messages don't get delivered timely.
- iamacyborg 5mo ago
  Huh that’s interesting, do you have any further context on that? I’ve not worked on a product with anywhere near that scale before so monitoring has always been whatever I can get from commercial push platforms
  - toast0 5mo ago
    I mean... record the time we first send a push message, when a client connects have it tell you if it's because it got a push or user interactive start, check the time between push and connection, add that to your choice of time series graphing tool. Graph by platform, and you can see when the platforms are delaying pushes. Some of the delay will be ordinary things like their push service fell over or is unreliable (you also get some feedback when they don't accept push messages), or their push connection runs into silent NAT timeouts on some networks. But some of it will be things like you ran into an undocumented push quota, so Blackberry users don't get timely pushes at peak, etc. On client platforms where you have reliable background execution with network connectivity, you can potentially signal connecting clients if platform push isn't working well and have them switch to persistent connections until the push service comes back. But that was never an option for iOS; it hasn't been a reasonable option for Android since at least Android 6 when Doze was introduced... and app killers before then made it hard before then; and all the other platforms are dead. Now, push really just has to work. AFAIK, Apple has always been willing to deprioritize pushes when you send "too many", especially when there's no user interaction; or when they added silent (voip) pushes to wake up the app, they only let you have a few silent pushes if you don't post a user visible push. For ordinary async messaging, push latency doesn't become a big deal until it hits double digit seconds. For voice/video calls, you really want pushes to be as near to real time as possible, or the caller is gone before the callee phone rings.
sparselogic 5mo ago
> Over fifteen years the channel has been rebuilt around one assumption: the receiver's attention is a scarce resource the platform is obliged to defend. … As a sender you are on the wrong side of that assumption, whichever way the control moved. Fascinating how the author openly frames the situation as the sender and receiver’s interests being opposed.
- iamacyborg 5mo ago
  A fairly uncharitable read, I’d argue it states that the platform is acting on the platform’s interest, not the user’s.
  - sparselogic 5mo ago
    Speaking from the standpoint of a user: I consider my attention a scarce resource that needs defending. To the extent a platform has the same assumption, its interests are aligned with mine. To the extent a sender does not have this assumption, I want the platform to defend my attention on my behalf.
- aidenn0 5mo ago
  They are not necessarily opposed, just in tension. A zealous guard of your attention will occasionally block something you would like to have seen. That being said, yes most notifications are garbage and should be blocked.
mikaeluman 5mo ago
I see the point. But honestly I am more concerned about having to constantly fight to turn off all permission allowances every time I install an app. And the moment I have some faith and trust an app that I deem important, I get promotional junk as a "notification". I would really like to have notifications allowed on certain apps like parking, or health etc., but all they seem to do is abuse the trust they are given, meaning I turn them off. So where I agree with this author is certainly that more power belongs at the user.
- thisislife2 5mo ago
  Apart from this, what is most needed in both platforms is an application firewall - not every app needs to be allowed to connect to the internet.
  - thewebguyd 5mo ago
    I can't believe this still isn't a thing outside of GrapheneOS. Being able to revoke network permissions is a fundamental security and privacy tool that's willfully left out of both Android and iOS. There's zero reason not to include it as a toggle.
    - TheNewsIsHere 5mo ago
      On iOS it wouldn’t even be that hard. There’s already a toggle to disable use of cellular connectivity. Add a separate one for non-cellular (iPadOS can connect via Ethernet), and/or a “disallow all” toggle. We are partly there in spirit with App Transparency keeping track of the IPs and hostnames apps connect to.
      - thisislife2 5mo ago
        Apparently chinese versions of ios (specifically for China) already have this feature because the Chinese government mandates it!
- thewebguyd 5mo ago
Tyr42 5mo ago
> None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified. Sounds fine with me?
lanerobertlane 5mo ago
If my phone interrupts me, it should either mean someone genuinely needs my attention right now or it should not be disrupting me at all. That's my notification set up. Apps allowed to receive push notifications Phone, Messages, Whatsapp, Apple Health, [brand] bank. That concludes the list. There is no reason any other app needs to be able to instantly ping me. Most apps are not notifying you because something matters; they are notifying you because they want your attention. I do not need notifications about streaks, sales, recommendations, delivery updates etc. All that can wait until I choose to open the app. It is not urgent enough to justify interrupting me.
- DanielHB 5mo ago
  I disable all group chat notifications too, only direct messages trigger notifications for me.
- e40 5mo ago
  Agreed. And let's not forget focus modes... I have them that narrow greatly my default set of notifications, so I have a 3 tiers of notifications. It's like the complaint I used to hear all the time: "Slack ruins work for me! OMG I can't work with constant interruptions!!" That is bewildering, because if that's how you feel, you haven't tuned your setup. Slack never interrupts me, yet I am response enough to slack messages. No one has ever complained about my response time. And I'm probably the most-messaged person on our Slack.
  - elliottkember 5mo ago
    > if that's how you feel, you haven't tuned your setup The withering cry of the software engineer "just tune your setup!" This is simply not a thing that people will do. The defaults are so, so important. They are crucial. The vast majority of people rely on the defaults to be sane. The defaults should be sane.
    - TheNewsIsHere 5mo ago
      Absolutely agreed. How much time must everyone be asked to waste to “tune” a working set of applications to something reasonably sane for human beings. Sure, what is sane for one human might not be for the next, but it’s not as if trends cannot be discerned. How ridiculous would it be to be told “if you don’t want people constantly barging into your office, lock the door”?
orf 5mo ago
> Google followed in 2010 with Cloud to Device Messaging, then Google Cloud Messaging in 2012, then Firebase Cloud Messaging in 2016 Classic
- pimlottc 5mo ago
  I’m curious if anything meaningful changed along with these name changes or it’s mostly issues of branding/implementation.
plasticeagle 5mo ago
Massively overlong article that really could have done with an editor. Although obviously editors cost money, and I'm reading it for free, so I can scarcely complain. Nevertheless, some concision would have been appreciated. I'm very unclear to me what the thesis of the article actually is. Yes, push notifications run through the vendor's servers. Yes, Apple fucked up hard by modifying the text within them - and I contend that such modification is impossible to perform automatically without unreliability becoming the norm. The author also appears to believe that "broadcast copy" - otherwise known as Spam by those who like to write slightly more honestly - is a legitimate use of push notifications. It is manifestly not, and any app that tries will at the very least be immediately silenced. I wish I could find the tweet that put this sentiment more entertainingly than I ever could. If App developers continue to abuse the push notification system in this way, Apple and Google will be forced to take steps to solve what becomes an end-user's problem. Yet another tragedy of the commons.
- iamacyborg 5mo ago
  It’s a through line from an article I posted last week about the similar situation in email, which has a lot more depth as inbox providers have substantially more published papers and patents showing their intermediation. https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/what-google-yahoo-microsoft-and-apple-are-doing-your-email https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/what-google-yahoo-... The next post will be highlighting the difference between the actual state of the art techniques being deployed by large tech co’s (LinkedIn and Pinterest, for example) vs what’s available via commercial marketing providers and how most marketers don’t even make the most of the tools they pay for. > The author also appears to believe that "broadcast copy" - otherwise known as Spam by those who like to write slightly more honestly - is a legitimate use of push notifications. It is manifestly not, and any app that tries will at the very least be immediately silenced. Cool man, but it might surprise you to find out that people knowingly opt into receiving this stuff and actually consent to it.
  - npunt 5mo ago
    > Cool man, but it might surprise you to find out that people knowingly opt into receiving this stuff and actually consent to it. Consent is more than pressing 'Allow' on a notification pop-up. It's often not even informed consent, as those pop-ups are usually a part of some onboarding flow where users are just trying to get to the value the app promises and pressing 'ok' to everything. Even if people do indeed want notifications at the time of the ask, one doesn't really know if the message provider will wind up spamming, that's a matter of trust. And once opted-in, even if the users no longer want notifications, a lot just don't know how to turn them off. People are often incredibly accepting of sub-par experiences like this because of the friction and capability demanded of them to opt-out. My parents get tons of spam notifications that would pass your test of 'knowingly opt into receiving' but that when asked they say they do not want. Finally there's myriad dark patterns that tons of apps use, like changing and resetting notification preferences among others. I'd hazard a guess that observed opt-in rates far exceed users actual desires, so I wouldn't put much stock in them. I do agree that there are some people that like them tho! Fwiw I've worked on both the delivery side (OneSignal) and developer side (Margins) so I've lived these choices and trade-offs. My believe is in terms of power dynamics, senders generally don't deserve their power to interrupt and should not possess that power. At best, they offer opportunities, which ideally are verified somehow prior to being presented to users. I'm happy that devices and ecosystems are moving in the direction of triaging and filtering sender content, as power needs to lie in the user's holistic, most pre-frontal cortex driven expression of their desired experience, and not just one moment's opt-in button they pressed. Thank you for writing the article, good discussion points.
nathanmills 5mo ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 5mo ago
  We've banned this account. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48301060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48301060 and marked it off topic.
  - nathanmills 5mo ago
    [dead]
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
efitz 5mo ago
Marketing and advertising people ruin everything they touch.
- iamacyborg 5mo ago
  Don’t forget the engineers and product folks who build these systems.
- ProllyInfamous 5mo ago
  >"But salesmen exist because customers don't actually know what they want" "I want item ABC rev D with options X, Y, & Z – I do not wish to pay for undercoating" >[salesperson looks at autist dumbfoundedly] "I'm not sure we can do that; don't even know what Y & Z are..." "It's a valid configuration, please just do this for me." ---- Why does my state still require new car sales via a dealership model?!
cadamsdotcom 5mo ago
I’m constantly amazed how passive people are with things that steal their attention My phone is in do not disturb mode 24/7. If your app notifies me about something pointless, it gets deleted and I start using your website instead I have a mail rule that moves any email with the word “unsubscribe” out of the inbox into its own tagged area. Every few days, I go in and unsubscribe to everything that’s arrived. Whenever a retail point of sale worker asks for my details or phone number or asks me to sign up to their club, I ask if there’s a discount. Because if there’s no discount - they get no details. It’s a simple exchange; offer to pay a fair price for my details and I’ll consider it. But so far my time and details are worth more than any retailer has offered to pay.
- pugio 5mo ago
  That unsubscribe rule is genius. (Obvious in hindsight, as the best things are.) Thanks for that.
  - cuuupid 5mo ago
    if you're in Gmail this filter works really well for me: ("list-unsubscribe" OR "unsubscribe" OR "list-id")
    - iamacyborg 5mo ago
      If you’re in gmail there’s literally already an interface to easily unsubscribe from stuff, it’s under “Manage subscriptions”. Yahoo similarly have a “subscriptions hub”
- al_borland 5mo ago
  With the retailer asking for a phone number, I don’t see how it would ever be worth even entertaining. They will give you a discount once, then have and potentially abuse your information for years to come.
  - criddell 5mo ago
    You can make an email rule to filter those messages to trash. I have my phone set to only ring for people in my address book. It’s probably time to do something similar for email. Not in my address book? Straight to trash.
felooboolooomba 5mo ago
This article separately needs a summary at top.
- iamacyborg 5mo ago
  Not everything needs to be summarised
  - felooboolooomba 5mo ago
    Pulling a straw man, eh? I didn't say that everything needed to to be summarised. But this article definitely does.
androidinlimbo 5mo ago
That's why my next phone will neither be Android or iPhone.
baby 5mo ago
Android is better because they allow you to change individual notifications right from the notifications themselves + granularly do it there also. On iOS I have to find the right setting page and then all notifications are either on or off. Doesn’t make sense.
- nielsbot 5mo ago
  You can long press on the notification (or swipe left?) and pick "Turn Off..." among other options https://support.apple.com/en-us/108781#manage-alerts https://support.apple.com/en-us/108781#manage-alerts
  - baby 5mo ago
    turn off is the only option basically, try an android phone bro
- Laurel1234 5mo ago
  This only works if the app properly tags notification categories, no?
  - aidenn0 5mo ago
    It also shows what category the notification was tagged with. An app that improperly tags notification categories gets one of two results from me: 1. Uninstall the app 2. If the app is non-optional for some reason, block all notifications.
drfloyd51 5mo ago
[flagged]
wanderingmind 5mo ago
The default must be pull, unless opt in for push. At the moment I would like notifications once a day or once a week for most apps. But instead I ha e turned it off completely, because of the push abuse. If I can configure to pull all the notifications on a predetermined cycle, it makes my life even better
preciousoo 5mo ago
I dont uninstall apps that annoy me with notifications, but I do disable them. Most of my notifications these days are news or texts. So be it
dools 5mo ago
“ None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified” So … mission accomplished then? This is pretty much how I would like it to operate.
- eks391 5mo ago
  That's my thinking too. Do marketers not also have phones, or do they somehow not see how annoying promotions and spam are? There's already so much paid advertising everywhere, and the free advertising with direct notification to the target is obviously going to be abused by these exact types of people. Guardrails must be put up by the transport layer (Google, Apple) so their own image isn't lowered to the image of the abusers that are too keen on promoting their disruptions. Few people want a convenient device that makes life inconvenient[1] [1] I know a few people whose phones constantly beep and flash numerous times a minute, and when on, the top is completely unusable because any notification dismissed is immediately replaced, obscuring those upper buttons again. I don't understand how they tolerate it.
dmitrygr 5mo ago
> 2 to 5 notifications per week is the optimal range for most apps and exceeding it materially increases uninstalls; Wow. Y’all must be much more tolerant of your time being wasted than i am. One notification from an app I didn’t need/request/expect is cause for deletion. 2-5 per week would be enough to go and rate the app 1/5 on the AppStore and actively recommend everyone I know to delete the app. > visibility into all of this is poor by design, and getting worse. Good! I pay Apple big money to protect me (user) from you (abusive app developer, abusive by definition since you talk about my attention as if it were your property)
tonymet 5mo ago
Google/Outlook/etc intervening with email was a good thing and saved email with spam filtering and content ranking. Mobile Carriers have not effectively intervened with phone screening and voice calls are practically dead. Intervening with push notifs could be a good thing. Notifs are approaching the point of uselessness. I turn all off by default now.
- iamacyborg 5mo ago
  What’s fun is all that “intervening” infrastructure they’ve introduced also doubles up as a big surveillance network.
  - tonymet 5mo ago
    how else could it work?
inventor7777 5mo ago
While I have slight worries about what it means for users if Apple and Google notification services go down/censoring, I do appreciate the features that they provide to me as an end user. So many apps use annoying and questionable marketing notifications that I'd say I have about 70% of app notifications disabled globally (because the app itself does not allow disabling notifications / has no granular control). However, it seems that SOME self hosted services can directly notify you without APNS / FCM. As an example, see https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notification-local/ https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notif...
- gumby271 5mo ago
  Am I understanding correctly that iOS notifications have to go over apns unless on the same local network as the HA server? I do appreciate that android makes this possible for ha and signal (and others) in all cases, it should be up to the user to choose centralizing the connection vs. slightly worse battery life.
  - inventor7777 5mo ago
    As far as I understand it, yes, you have to be connected locally. The question is, will it work over Tailscale/WireGuard? I'd assume so, but I've honestly never tested local pushes as I simply haven't needed them :)
QuadmasterXLII 5mo ago
If my phone buzzes and I look at it and the reason was dumb, I delete the offending app and leave a 1 star review. I don’t know which of these steps are loadbearing, but my phone has gotten much quieter.
_HMCB_ 5mo ago
Am I supposed to feel sorry for developers? How did this make it to page one?
- extraduder_ire 5mo ago
  Seeing how they think about these things can be interesting.
wps 5mo ago
The real solution is to allow users to own their push solution, and for it to become more commonplace among apps to support alternative push providers such as Unified Push. Molly, the FOSS Android Signal client supports this configuration.
drnick1 5mo ago
Personally, I don't see a few permanent connections as a problem. My GrapheneOS phone is degoogled, and therefore apps such as Signal fall back to a WebSocket connection. Battery life is probably somewhat impacted, but I use too few apps to notice. And in any case, this is much better than allowing Google to stick its nose into my business.
- gumby271 5mo ago
  Yeah I'm disappointed this isn't pointed out in the opening paragraph. It's fair to critique Google for convincing devs that fcm is the only option, and obviously iOS is designed for Apple to do whatever they want, regardless of the owner's wishes, but Android does have other, viable, options. iOS and Android aren't equally bad here.
elzbardico 5mo ago
Oh man... I just wish someone invented some form of organization where workers could negotiate with employers in a more equal footing by doing this in a collective way.
dualvariable 5mo ago
let me pour one out for all my homies in the marketing department...
0x59 5mo ago
I don't think I've got a push notification in awhile. Few months ago I switched to Lineageos and started using the web browser instead of apps. It's peaceful. I still get notifications (SMS, email, calendar, etc) but nothing pushed
DrBenCarson 5mo ago
Vast majority of software should not be able to send a push notification. Send an email if you need to alert me.
netik 5mo ago
This sure sounds like a marketer spending far too many words crying that they've lost surveillance on their customers. Boo hoo, don't care.
LoganDark 5mo ago
I need a feature to block my bank's incessant nagging about cash-back deals while keeping the ones about transactions. Right now on iOS there is no way to do this. And yes, I've explicitly turned off the cash-back deals notifications in my bank app's settings and that is completely ignored.
- gumby271 5mo ago
  I don't know if there's an iOS equivalent, but Buzzkill on Android is really great for this. I set up filters to hide all the stupid Amazon ad notifications.
dminor 5mo ago
Predictably people are moving back to SMS for notifications. Not as nice for linking to your app but once the user opts in you don't have to deal with the Apple/Google complexity.
- iamacyborg 5mo ago
  SMS will go exactly the same direction as push as far as being intermediated.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
passive 5mo ago
For whatever reason, I get very few push notifications on my phone. Compared to my days at Blackberry, it's probably 10% as frequent that I get interrupted by my phone. So good for me. But there's some really scary stuff in here happening to other people that I'm not even aware of.
bofaGuy 5mo ago
I feel like the CAN-SPAM Act should apply to push notifications as well. I don’t know of any case that has tested this.
shevy-java 5mo ago
I live a push-notification free life, aka no push ever. I also saw elderly people receiving such notifications and not knowing why. Then I realised that this system is designed to abuse the elderly, so I am now totally against it.
jacobajit 5mo ago
iOS really needs LLM-based notification filtering. This would take care of promotional notification spam overnight. It would even enable fine-grained user filtering like "notify when - someone is messaging me about plans for today."
- awakeasleep 5mo ago
  Because Apple makes iOS, they could have a much more rigorous solution, like Google’s. A nondeterministic, energy hungry classifier is inferior to writing a policy to define channels.
  - jacobajit 5mo ago
    You really need both. Channels are a great first level, and iOS absolutely needs to implement an Android-tier version of this. But channels continue to be abused, even on Android. When all deterministic controls fail... Secondly, channels are set by the developer (or platform). In an ideal world, I want to define whatever channels I care about, and turn them on/off at will.
bandrami 5mo ago
Also can the browsers finally acknowledge that allowing websites to request the ability to send desktop notifications was a terrible mistake?
deleted 5mo ago
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pslab 5mo ago
[flagged]
newtwentysix 5mo ago
My Android phone has a long list of toggles under notification for each app. I am genuinely interested to make good use of that to optimise what notifications I recieve, but I am clueless about what each of them means . For example: badges, floating notifications, permanent notifications, unified support, alerts, etc.
karlgkk 5mo ago
> that answers to the user rather than to you. You cannot out-shout it, and there is no appeal. "now here's a list of how to get around that!"
simulator5g 5mo ago
This part is factually incorrect: "...a notification lives only in the notification centre, which clears, drops and summarises what passes through it and retains nothing reliably." Your notification center reliably retains information. Something like an inbox does exist, just not in userland: https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/10/fbi-pulled-deleted-signal-messages-from-an-iphone-without-breaking-encryption/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/10/fbi-pulle...
lorenzleutgeb 5mo ago
How does this not mention alternatives? Here: UnifiedPush.org And the author is also wrong that all notifications on my phone go via Google. Signal and Mastodon notifications are set up via Sunup. They seem to have given up. Don't do that please...
lionkor 5mo ago
Turn off all notifications except messaging and see how your day goes. It's not going to kill you. You quickly get used to regularly checking things you actually care about, and the rest has to wait until YOU care. I've been doing this for many years, and none of my friends or colleagues are aware of it, and they don't need to be. Notifications don't help you respond quickly, they just grab your attention from things YOU wanted to do. I haven't checked Discord today yet. I haven't checked my email. Whenever I do want to know if my friends wrote me, or if I have some new bills, or if I need to follow up on something, I will open the respective app and deal with it. I can put my phone next to me for hours and not get distracted.
- epicide 5mo ago
  > You quickly get used to regularly checking things you actually care about, and the rest has to wait until YOU care. This was the biggest thing for me. Before, I was paranoid that if I turned off notifications, I'd miss something important. As though I didn't miss notifications anyway. Getting used to regularly checking (important) things also has two wonderful side effects (at least it did for me): * My "mental notification system" got better. Because I was less dependent on my phone doing it for me, I developed the skill more on my own. * The apps and services that I checked less and less frequently became more obvious in how unimportant they were to me altogether. I have far fewer apps and accounts now, making me MORE punctual overall.
hennell 5mo ago
IMO they should be doing way more to control push notifications, there's so much more control they could give the user, and many clear violations of their policies. One of the best apps I've bought for android is buzz kill which lets you set rules around notifications. I have cool downs on family chats and social media so it doesn't keep buzzing when things kick off, filter Amazon alerts to only "we're two stops away" and "We've delivered" messages and dismiss the rest. I have custom buzz patterns and sounds for urgent alerts and rules that batch notifications depending what WiFi I'm on, time outs on things that don't matter after a few hours etc. My notifications list is now way smaller and far more relevant. Also quickest way to sort out notifications is to take your phone off silent. Hearing everything coming in, you see more when it you can then decide if the notification should make noise, or exist at all on a per app basis.
mcdonje 5mo ago
The entire architecture here is surprising to me. >an iPhone could not afford to let every installed application maintain its own background poll against a remote server. The proposal...a single persistent TLS connection from each device to Apple, over which any registered third party could deliver alerts. I thought apps were sending notifications locally in the device. Like, if a messaging app receives a message, there's a network call for that. Then if the messaging app wants to tell the user they received a message, it can just hit a local API for that, right? Is the pattern actually that the app makes another network call to the notification service to register the notification, which makes another network call to the device to deliver it?
- mrbombastic 5mo ago
  yeah this is what author hints at with "Push as a battery problem". Apps are limited by default in what they can do in the background due to this, so most apps are in a suspended state not making network calls when you are not using them. To avoid the app having to keep running this stuff is delegated to OS which tells the app, "hey I have a push for you wake up and handle it!" You can send pushes locally but because of the background limitation it is not practical for unpredictable events like messages coming in.
  - mcdonje 5mo ago
    What you're describing seems reasonable, but it doesn't align with what I quoted, unless I'm missing something, which I very well could be. Having apps sleep and a daemon wake them to handle notifications doesn't require all of the notifications coming from Apple.
    - mrbombastic 5mo ago
      Not sure i understand. Sure it doesn’t require it but Apple doesn’t trust you to handle it because you’ll probably drain the battery or spam the user or whatever, that is Apple MO, putting themselves in the middle so they can control the experience. The single persistent connection is just to receive pushes, there is still some daemon controlled by apple in charged of dispatching to correct app.
avazhi 5mo ago
I've had all notifications turned off expect for my immediate family (parents, wife) for years now. I'd get rid of my phone before going back to getting buzzed and dinged constantly.
autoexec 5mo ago
What I'm doing: leaving them all off
annagio_ 5mo ago
Isn't this a strategic going for years now, throwing random notifications to make the user use more the app? I for once, block notifications from apps I don't want, because I don't like getting bombed with stupid ads etc.
braiamp 5mo ago
[dead]
AlexandrB 5mo ago
> What the marketer can see > Your visibility into all of this is poor by design, and getting worse. Great! This article is all good news, it seems.
limaoscarjuliet 5mo ago
The first thing I do on every new phone is to turn off 99% of notifications. Messaging ones and email are first to go. I cannot stand the constant beep-beep.
thanksobama 5mo ago
Whatever has replaced the Bulk Collection of Telephony Metadata Under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act informs the architecture of the Apple Push Notification, Firebase Cloud Messaging, etc. Apple owns the persistent connection to every iPhone, and only APNs can wake your app. So "self-hosting" here means running your own provider (the backend that decides what to send and hands it to APNs) instead of paying a third party like Firebase Cloud Messaging, OneSignal, or Pusher to do that for you. The last mile is never yours however. Any architecture that routes everyone's traffic through a small number of identity-aware intermediaries is, by construction, a bulk-metadata collection system waiting for a legal instrument. [2] In December 2023 Senator Ron Wyden disclosed that the U.S. government and foreign governments had secretly compelled Google and Apple to turn over information from push notifications, including communications metadata and sometimes content. A detail that should bother any developer: app developers have no way to stop the practice if they want to send notifications on the platforms iPhones and Android rely on. Apple had been gagged from disclosing it until the program became public, after which it said it was updating its transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests. So the architectural hypothesis isn't speculative — it's the confirmed mechanism, differing from Section 215 mainly in domain (apps vs. calls) and legal vehicle (ordinary subpoenas, FISA orders, and NSLs rather than the specific business-records theory of §215) [1] "Its just metadata". Thanks Obama! (joking of course, no single individual is responsible for these things, it is our collective political will and its the best we can do unfortunately) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUdm0QMDM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUdm0QMDM0 [2] https://epic.org/sen-wyden-reveals-government-surveillance-of-smartphone-push-notifications/ https://epic.org/sen-wyden-reveals-government-surveillance-o...
megous 5mo ago
There are apps that need 100% notification delivery reliability (in a sense that OS or delivery server itself will not be allowed to decide to just drop PN for policy reasons). I guess Google can only "solve" this (by simply not passing them through any "classification") for their own apps only? For some android phone brands delivery reliability is like 40-50%. Some brands are better (reaching 80%, still bad) some very bad (usually the chinese brands, for some reason). And the user has no say in this. They can't say: deliver every notification without classification. Or "allow this app to wakeup whenever it wants". Everything is babysat by the great overseer, even if you write the app yourself for yourself. Have fun writing a telephony app that receives only 50% of calls. :D
k_plankenhorn 5mo ago
I'm building a productivity app right now that lives entirely on the web right now because I can't justify native development costs yet. The daily nudge (i.e., you have 47 free minutes, and this task has been sitting for 14 days) is the core retention metric. This only works as a push notification; emails get ignored. The web app sends an email. V2 goes native specifically for this reason. The article's point about leading with the fact rather than the brand point is useful. The notification payload I'm designing already leads with the concrete numbers.
nathan_compton 5mo ago
Smart phones should absolutely allow you to lie to apps about what permissions they have, to feed apps fake data, and to basically control every single thing the app sees about the phone and the user. The fact that they do not do this reveals that phone makers are sort of market makers between app makers and customers, creating an environment which, in a certain sense, is a neutral ground between these two types of "users."
moritzwarhier 5mo ago
Apple and Google are pushing push notifications? No way! Pun aside, it makes sense for a notification framework including a notification delivery network to be built into these mobile OSes, because the alternative (letting applications run arbitrary background services) is usually worse.
davidgh 5mo ago
My frustration is with services like Uber, Bolt, Airbnb, etc. where you need the push for core services and then the provides use them to slip in spam.
- bbarn 5mo ago
  Uber is especially bad here. I live rural, but when I travel I use it (and uber eats sometimes) when I'm out of town. At this point I uninstall the app and only install it when I know I might use it because it's so invasive with marketing crap. Even more annoying is the fact that why yes, I would love a burger delivered but there's literally nothing your service can get me to my home.
- willk 5mo ago
  Apple/Google has effectively made notification worthless because they allow services to abuse notifications. I wish they respected my time/attention more.
semiinfinitely 5mo ago
technology should be silent
sitzkrieg 5mo ago
apple can’t even make a working alarm clock on a smartphone
- willk 5mo ago
  Mine works, what are you talking about?
  - sitzkrieg 4mo ago
    1000s of people have their alarm on ios go off completely silent daily. mine did it 6 days in a week before i got a physical alarm clock. and yes, all the usual settings are correct. more H1Bs please!
just_some_guy_2 5mo ago
Interesting article. When I was young, the household would receive a bunch of physical catalogs from shops in or near my hometown. We would all sit around the coffee table going through them and looking for good deals. If all these catalogs had a build-in tracker so that the sender could magically measure how long the catalog was in the mailbox, if it was read before ending up in the trash, how many people in the household saw the catalog, how many pages were seen and so on... we would all have freaked out and burned the catalogs up at once! But now that kind of surveillance is just normal. Sad.
simjnd 5mo ago
> Email gives you layout control via HTML; push gives you a small structured payload and little control over the collapsed lock-screen view beyond the platform's templates Thank god for this. I absolutely do NOT want my notification center to become a playground for marketing people to try to manipulate my attention even more than they already do. Every notification would have flashy animations and should adhere to the brand guidelines of whatever app or company is sending them.

423 points by iamacyborg 5mo ago

I'm surprised that the article is this long with zero mention of Senator Wyden's concerns vis-a-vis Google and Apple's Push Notification system: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_push_notification_surveillance_letter.pdf https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_...

iamacyborg 5mo ago
I’m in the UK so I don’t catch all us news, good spot though

nateguchi 5mo ago

I feel like this article reads like the author is upset that Apple + Google prevent / control certain types of notifications (read: spam) > Cross-sell, upsell, education and discovery can work on push Push notifications should only be for transactional notifications. I don't want another inbox for junk.

Forgeties79 5mo ago
>discovery I can’t think of a single app I want a “Discover” tab on anymore. The moment you include one is the moment there is someone trying to game it. I definitely don’t want push notifications trying to show me something new. I’m hardly lacking in distractions (Yes I am sure somebody can give me an example of a good use of Discover but you get my point)
iamacyborg 5mo ago
Not upset, but increasingly concerned that all channels are being intermediated by big tech.
- supriyo-biswas 5mo ago
  Something might come of introspecting why such controls are being built and desired by consumers instead of trying to frame everything as a "big tech evil!!1" narrative.
  - iamacyborg 5mo ago
    I’d recommend following your own train of thought, why is big tech so hell bent on intermediating the experience between their users and everyone else? They’ve done it for email, web search, mobile experiences, advertising, etc. You want to use any of those things, you’ll have to pay their toll booth, figuratively or literally.
    - dodobirdlord 5mo ago
      The chain of thought is quite straightforward. Functionally nobody wants an intermediary-free channel because there are adversarial entities on the other end.
      - iamacyborg 5mo ago
        Do you think that logic holds true for web search as well? Because this is happening there in a much stronger way too.
    - nyx 5mo ago
      I'm not a fan of Apple or Google, and it feels bad that all of our notifications pass through APNS or FCM. Megacorps shouldn't have control over our digital lives to the extent that they do, and anyone talking about this gets my full attention and support. Except for marketers! I don't think there's a less sympathetic category of technologists, save for maybe CSAM peddlers. You're upset that you can't get "visibility" into whether the bullshit ad you tried to ram down my throat landed on target? You're worried that I'm a dormant user and my phone will silently delete the spam you sent to try to hook me back into engaging with whatever worthless product you're hawking? World's tiniest violin, buddy. Boo fucking hoo. Your last paragraph says the "senders" (read: spammers) who make it through the next decade intact will be, to lightly paraphrase, the ones who send messages the recipients actually wanted. You say that like it's a bad thing! The computer is in my life because it is a tool that does the things I want. It is not an open mic for marketing sleazebags to try to sell me shit. May every single one of your attempts to invade my life and hijack my attention be flushed swiftly down the toilet.
tcdent 5mo ago
Yeah these channels used to be respected in that way. And then app developers discovered that hooks like "look what you missed" work on users and so now we all have to get them in the same category.
baxtr 5mo ago
Agreed. I have a doc appointment app, where I like the notifications to be on for reminders etc. Lately they started sending marketing messages through that channel. Now I’m sure it’s possible to turn off the marketing messages. But I bet most people don’t know and won’t change that. It’s super annoying.
- iamacyborg 5mo ago
  And soon, those appointment reminders might quietly be dismissed by your phone without you being any the wiser.
  - lanerobertlane 5mo ago
    [dead]
- whstl 5mo ago
  Same for things like Uber. I do want to know when a car is arriving. I don't want messages asking if I'm hungry.
  - warkdarrior 5mo ago
    Hi whstl, Are you hungry? Open your Uber Eats app now for 10% off. /this message sent through PalantirFinder -- from marketing and coupons to ordnance, we deliver everything!
- TheNewsIsHere 5mo ago
  I absolutely hate medical marketing. I recently decided to switch dermatology practices over a combination of bad data management, unwelcome marketing for cosmetic dermatology products, and unsolicited SMSs. I never consented to receive marketing or texts (or to lose my data in a data breach, or to be billed for the in person services by practices other than the one from which I received services and ignored unopened as spam because I didn’t recognize the sender, etc…) But I digress.
- no-name-here 5mo ago
thisislife2 5mo ago
That's not entirely fair to the author as the article also states that the consumer being in control is a must: > Every step subtracts a degree of sender control. Some of it passes to the user, and that is a good thing: a person deciding what is allowed to interrupt them is the channel working as it should. The rest passes to the platform, and that is the part that should concern a sender, because the platform's judgment is opaque, unappealable, and increasingly made by a model rather than by a setting the user chose. A platform has essentially two "clients" - the user and the developer. Without both, it wouldn't exist. And it is in the interest of both that the platform should have very limited arbitrary authority over them. Nobody can deny today that the platform owners today have too much power over their users and their developers, which makes it easy for them to commercially exploit them while undermining their rights. We need regulations and standards (for interoperability, which is one of the arguments being made) to counter this.
- refulgentis 5mo ago
  Been an app developer since 2009, worked on Android for 6 years at Google. Push notifications suck, users hate them. Simultaneously, I cannot match the pull quote, an argument summary, to their argumentation. IIUC if the reword patent / Apple’s summarizing disappear there’s 0 reason to say it wasn’t control passing purely to the consumer. So I’m left a bit empty as the high-minded purpose has little backing, and thus comes across as bloviating.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
> (read: spam) is it unironically incomprehensible to you that the owner of the device should in the one who gets to decide what is and isn't spam? it's not email where you can get bombarded with shit from any random server - you can mute or uninstall an app.
- whstl 5mo ago
  It should but apps don't let us decide. An intermediate seems to be trying to fix it. Is it ideal? No. But it's the spammers who are to blame.
  - b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
    like I said, you decide by muting or removing the offending app.
    - whstl 5mo ago
      Fine, but that’s was clearly not enough to stop the spam, nor it was enough to satisfy everyone. There are some apps I can’t afford to mute or uninstall, such as phone, transportation, communication and work. I wish I could, but I currently can’t, I’m not privileged enough. “Punishment by Apple” in this instance is somehow the only response anyone had to misbehaving companies.
  - TheNewsIsHere 5mo ago
    You know, I would love a feature that lets me mark push notifications as spam, and optionally send them to Apple. The last part is important for a variety of reasons, one of which is that notifications can be end to end encrypted. Spam filter push notifications. Ideally enough spam reports for Uber Eat’s constant marketing abuse and they lose APNs access for the Bundle ID associated with the spam reports. For example.
    - nickf 5mo ago
      You’re right of course, but Apple won’t do it - they’re happily running a two-tier system where Uber, eBay, Doordash can force spam notifications on you with impunity. All my settings for marketing are off - eBay still sends me notifications about coupons (and additionally there’s no way to actually contact them to complain, of course). Doordash won’t let me get delivery notifications without marketing notifications. Apple could fully enforce their policies and fix this in a heartbeat, but they won’t.
hithre 5mo ago
Depends. Blackberry 10 hub was strongly designed as a shared inbox instead of a loose system of notification like ios or android. And it was awesome.
ghostly_s 5mo ago
The "you" in the title's reference to "your push notifications" is not the user, it is the marketer. That tells you everything you need to know about the value of this piece.
lukeschlather 5mo ago
I've definitely had notifications I consider spam direct from Google before. Apple/Google are not trustworthy.
EZ-E 5mo ago
I wish Apple would force app developers to implement different "channels" for promotional notifications vs transactional - so that you can pick and choose which ones you want.
- mycall 5mo ago
  In-app notifications settings should do this if they are trustworthy.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

toomuchtodo 5mo ago

Push notifications are for the user, not the marketer. From the author's blog: "I do Revenue Operation, helping Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams with data, process and technology."

iamacyborg 5mo ago
You think there might be some sort of interaction between both facets there? How is bad summarisation good for a user, for example?
- TheNewsIsHere 5mo ago
  Probably depends on the user. Along with push notifications for almost every app on every one of my devices, I disable the summarization. For me the notification is the point, and the point of notifications to me is that they deserve my attention. Of the vanishingly few apps I install these days, almost nothing can say it deserves my attention. Even my bank doesn’t get those privileges.
  - iamacyborg 5mo ago
    I largely do the same, and keep my phone on dnd mode.
- nickburns 5mo ago
  > You think there might be some sort of interaction between both facets there? With the exception of one trying to extract currency from the other, in exchange for something of dubious value—no.
- AlexandrB 5mo ago
  The interaction is: marketers keep trying to abuse these systems and platform owners and users keep having to find ways to fight them off. Some of these efforts have unfortunate downstream consequences (like bad summaries).

balderdash 5mo ago

I wish apple/google would implement better notification control - like the ability to turn off all marketing notifications, and a much better digest format

iamacyborg 5mo ago
That would be nice. I wouldn’t be surprised, as on-phone models get more capable, if we don’t see them start to build an “inbox” like we see with email where you can then start seeing much more heavy processing happening.
- gumby271 5mo ago
  I think that's what the Notification Organizer on Android (maybe Pixel exclusive, not sure) does. It's sorting notifications into broad categories using AI and groups them in the notification shade.
  - iamacyborg 5mo ago
    Makes sense, Google definitely have a lot more experience in that space with gmail than Apple do.
tencentshill 5mo ago
Notification Channels is the official way to do this on Android, but it's up to the app developer to categorize them properly. They have no incentive to allow you to turn off ads.
- aag 5mo ago
  Actually, they do have an incentive to let you turn off ads. If they don't, many users will turn off notifications entirely. At least if they categorize them, some users will just turn off the bothersome ones.
  - orrito 5mo ago

toast0 5mo ago

> For most of the channel's history they did very little of it visibly. The architecture was permissive of intervention; they simply chose not to intervene much. That restraint is what ended. I guess it wasn't always visible, but they were intervening in some for or another since the beginning. At WhatsApp, push delay/suppression/coalescing was something we were always monitoring, and IIRC, it was part of the system since at least when I joined in 2011. If you don't work within the system, your users' messages don't get delivered timely.

iamacyborg 5mo ago
Huh that’s interesting, do you have any further context on that? I’ve not worked on a product with anywhere near that scale before so monitoring has always been whatever I can get from commercial push platforms
- toast0 5mo ago
  I mean... record the time we first send a push message, when a client connects have it tell you if it's because it got a push or user interactive start, check the time between push and connection, add that to your choice of time series graphing tool. Graph by platform, and you can see when the platforms are delaying pushes. Some of the delay will be ordinary things like their push service fell over or is unreliable (you also get some feedback when they don't accept push messages), or their push connection runs into silent NAT timeouts on some networks. But some of it will be things like you ran into an undocumented push quota, so Blackberry users don't get timely pushes at peak, etc. On client platforms where you have reliable background execution with network connectivity, you can potentially signal connecting clients if platform push isn't working well and have them switch to persistent connections until the push service comes back. But that was never an option for iOS; it hasn't been a reasonable option for Android since at least Android 6 when Doze was introduced... and app killers before then made it hard before then; and all the other platforms are dead. Now, push really just has to work. AFAIK, Apple has always been willing to deprioritize pushes when you send "too many", especially when there's no user interaction; or when they added silent (voip) pushes to wake up the app, they only let you have a few silent pushes if you don't post a user visible push. For ordinary async messaging, push latency doesn't become a big deal until it hits double digit seconds. For voice/video calls, you really want pushes to be as near to real time as possible, or the caller is gone before the callee phone rings.

sparselogic 5mo ago

> Over fifteen years the channel has been rebuilt around one assumption: the receiver's attention is a scarce resource the platform is obliged to defend. … As a sender you are on the wrong side of that assumption, whichever way the control moved. Fascinating how the author openly frames the situation as the sender and receiver’s interests being opposed.

iamacyborg 5mo ago
A fairly uncharitable read, I’d argue it states that the platform is acting on the platform’s interest, not the user’s.
- sparselogic 5mo ago
  Speaking from the standpoint of a user: I consider my attention a scarce resource that needs defending. To the extent a platform has the same assumption, its interests are aligned with mine. To the extent a sender does not have this assumption, I want the platform to defend my attention on my behalf.
aidenn0 5mo ago
They are not necessarily opposed, just in tension. A zealous guard of your attention will occasionally block something you would like to have seen. That being said, yes most notifications are garbage and should be blocked.

mikaeluman 5mo ago

I see the point. But honestly I am more concerned about having to constantly fight to turn off all permission allowances every time I install an app. And the moment I have some faith and trust an app that I deem important, I get promotional junk as a "notification". I would really like to have notifications allowed on certain apps like parking, or health etc., but all they seem to do is abuse the trust they are given, meaning I turn them off. So where I agree with this author is certainly that more power belongs at the user.

thisislife2 5mo ago
Apart from this, what is most needed in both platforms is an application firewall - not every app needs to be allowed to connect to the internet.
- thewebguyd 5mo ago
  I can't believe this still isn't a thing outside of GrapheneOS. Being able to revoke network permissions is a fundamental security and privacy tool that's willfully left out of both Android and iOS. There's zero reason not to include it as a toggle.
  - TheNewsIsHere 5mo ago
    On iOS it wouldn’t even be that hard. There’s already a toggle to disable use of cellular connectivity. Add a separate one for non-cellular (iPadOS can connect via Ethernet), and/or a “disallow all” toggle. We are partly there in spirit with App Transparency keeping track of the IPs and hostnames apps connect to.
    - thisislife2 5mo ago
      Apparently chinese versions of ios (specifically for China) already have this feature because the Chinese government mandates it!
thewebguyd 5mo ago

Tyr42 5mo ago

> None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified. Sounds fine with me?

lanerobertlane 5mo ago

If my phone interrupts me, it should either mean someone genuinely needs my attention right now or it should not be disrupting me at all. That's my notification set up. Apps allowed to receive push notifications Phone, Messages, Whatsapp, Apple Health, [brand] bank. That concludes the list. There is no reason any other app needs to be able to instantly ping me. Most apps are not notifying you because something matters; they are notifying you because they want your attention. I do not need notifications about streaks, sales, recommendations, delivery updates etc. All that can wait until I choose to open the app. It is not urgent enough to justify interrupting me.

DanielHB 5mo ago
I disable all group chat notifications too, only direct messages trigger notifications for me.
e40 5mo ago
Agreed. And let's not forget focus modes... I have them that narrow greatly my default set of notifications, so I have a 3 tiers of notifications. It's like the complaint I used to hear all the time: "Slack ruins work for me! OMG I can't work with constant interruptions!!" That is bewildering, because if that's how you feel, you haven't tuned your setup. Slack never interrupts me, yet I am response enough to slack messages. No one has ever complained about my response time. And I'm probably the most-messaged person on our Slack.
- elliottkember 5mo ago
  > if that's how you feel, you haven't tuned your setup The withering cry of the software engineer "just tune your setup!" This is simply not a thing that people will do. The defaults are so, so important. They are crucial. The vast majority of people rely on the defaults to be sane. The defaults should be sane.
  - TheNewsIsHere 5mo ago
    Absolutely agreed. How much time must everyone be asked to waste to “tune” a working set of applications to something reasonably sane for human beings. Sure, what is sane for one human might not be for the next, but it’s not as if trends cannot be discerned. How ridiculous would it be to be told “if you don’t want people constantly barging into your office, lock the door”?

orf 5mo ago

> Google followed in 2010 with Cloud to Device Messaging, then Google Cloud Messaging in 2012, then Firebase Cloud Messaging in 2016 Classic

pimlottc 5mo ago
I’m curious if anything meaningful changed along with these name changes or it’s mostly issues of branding/implementation.

plasticeagle 5mo ago

Massively overlong article that really could have done with an editor. Although obviously editors cost money, and I'm reading it for free, so I can scarcely complain. Nevertheless, some concision would have been appreciated. I'm very unclear to me what the thesis of the article actually is. Yes, push notifications run through the vendor's servers. Yes, Apple fucked up hard by modifying the text within them - and I contend that such modification is impossible to perform automatically without unreliability becoming the norm. The author also appears to believe that "broadcast copy" - otherwise known as Spam by those who like to write slightly more honestly - is a legitimate use of push notifications. It is manifestly not, and any app that tries will at the very least be immediately silenced. I wish I could find the tweet that put this sentiment more entertainingly than I ever could. If App developers continue to abuse the push notification system in this way, Apple and Google will be forced to take steps to solve what becomes an end-user's problem. Yet another tragedy of the commons.

iamacyborg 5mo ago
It’s a through line from an article I posted last week about the similar situation in email, which has a lot more depth as inbox providers have substantially more published papers and patents showing their intermediation. https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/what-google-yahoo-microsoft-and-apple-are-doing-your-email https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/what-google-yahoo-... The next post will be highlighting the difference between the actual state of the art techniques being deployed by large tech co’s (LinkedIn and Pinterest, for example) vs what’s available via commercial marketing providers and how most marketers don’t even make the most of the tools they pay for. > The author also appears to believe that "broadcast copy" - otherwise known as Spam by those who like to write slightly more honestly - is a legitimate use of push notifications. It is manifestly not, and any app that tries will at the very least be immediately silenced. Cool man, but it might surprise you to find out that people knowingly opt into receiving this stuff and actually consent to it.
- npunt 5mo ago
  > Cool man, but it might surprise you to find out that people knowingly opt into receiving this stuff and actually consent to it. Consent is more than pressing 'Allow' on a notification pop-up. It's often not even informed consent, as those pop-ups are usually a part of some onboarding flow where users are just trying to get to the value the app promises and pressing 'ok' to everything. Even if people do indeed want notifications at the time of the ask, one doesn't really know if the message provider will wind up spamming, that's a matter of trust. And once opted-in, even if the users no longer want notifications, a lot just don't know how to turn them off. People are often incredibly accepting of sub-par experiences like this because of the friction and capability demanded of them to opt-out. My parents get tons of spam notifications that would pass your test of 'knowingly opt into receiving' but that when asked they say they do not want. Finally there's myriad dark patterns that tons of apps use, like changing and resetting notification preferences among others. I'd hazard a guess that observed opt-in rates far exceed users actual desires, so I wouldn't put much stock in them. I do agree that there are some people that like them tho! Fwiw I've worked on both the delivery side (OneSignal) and developer side (Margins) so I've lived these choices and trade-offs. My believe is in terms of power dynamics, senders generally don't deserve their power to interrupt and should not possess that power. At best, they offer opportunities, which ideally are verified somehow prior to being presented to users. I'm happy that devices and ecosystems are moving in the direction of triaging and filtering sender content, as power needs to lie in the user's holistic, most pre-frontal cortex driven expression of their desired experience, and not just one moment's opt-in button they pressed. Thank you for writing the article, good discussion points.

nathanmills 5mo ago

[flagged]

tomhow 5mo ago
We've banned this account. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48301060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48301060 and marked it off topic.
- nathanmills 5mo ago
  [dead]

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

efitz 5mo ago

Marketing and advertising people ruin everything they touch.

iamacyborg 5mo ago
Don’t forget the engineers and product folks who build these systems.
ProllyInfamous 5mo ago
>"But salesmen exist because customers don't actually know what they want" "I want item ABC rev D with options X, Y, & Z – I do not wish to pay for undercoating" >[salesperson looks at autist dumbfoundedly] "I'm not sure we can do that; don't even know what Y & Z are..." "It's a valid configuration, please just do this for me." ---- Why does my state still require new car sales via a dealership model?!

cadamsdotcom 5mo ago

I’m constantly amazed how passive people are with things that steal their attention My phone is in do not disturb mode 24/7. If your app notifies me about something pointless, it gets deleted and I start using your website instead I have a mail rule that moves any email with the word “unsubscribe” out of the inbox into its own tagged area. Every few days, I go in and unsubscribe to everything that’s arrived. Whenever a retail point of sale worker asks for my details or phone number or asks me to sign up to their club, I ask if there’s a discount. Because if there’s no discount - they get no details. It’s a simple exchange; offer to pay a fair price for my details and I’ll consider it. But so far my time and details are worth more than any retailer has offered to pay.

pugio 5mo ago
That unsubscribe rule is genius. (Obvious in hindsight, as the best things are.) Thanks for that.
- cuuupid 5mo ago
  if you're in Gmail this filter works really well for me: ("list-unsubscribe" OR "unsubscribe" OR "list-id")
  - iamacyborg 5mo ago
    If you’re in gmail there’s literally already an interface to easily unsubscribe from stuff, it’s under “Manage subscriptions”. Yahoo similarly have a “subscriptions hub”
al_borland 5mo ago
With the retailer asking for a phone number, I don’t see how it would ever be worth even entertaining. They will give you a discount once, then have and potentially abuse your information for years to come.
- criddell 5mo ago
  You can make an email rule to filter those messages to trash. I have my phone set to only ring for people in my address book. It’s probably time to do something similar for email. Not in my address book? Straight to trash.

felooboolooomba 5mo ago

This article separately needs a summary at top.

iamacyborg 5mo ago
Not everything needs to be summarised
- felooboolooomba 5mo ago
  Pulling a straw man, eh? I didn't say that everything needed to to be summarised. But this article definitely does.

androidinlimbo 5mo ago

That's why my next phone will neither be Android or iPhone.

baby 5mo ago

Android is better because they allow you to change individual notifications right from the notifications themselves + granularly do it there also. On iOS I have to find the right setting page and then all notifications are either on or off. Doesn’t make sense.

nielsbot 5mo ago
You can long press on the notification (or swipe left?) and pick "Turn Off..." among other options https://support.apple.com/en-us/108781#manage-alerts https://support.apple.com/en-us/108781#manage-alerts
- baby 5mo ago
  turn off is the only option basically, try an android phone bro
Laurel1234 5mo ago
This only works if the app properly tags notification categories, no?
- aidenn0 5mo ago
  It also shows what category the notification was tagged with. An app that improperly tags notification categories gets one of two results from me: 1. Uninstall the app 2. If the app is non-optional for some reason, block all notifications.

drfloyd51 5mo ago

[flagged]

wanderingmind 5mo ago

The default must be pull, unless opt in for push. At the moment I would like notifications once a day or once a week for most apps. But instead I ha e turned it off completely, because of the push abuse. If I can configure to pull all the notifications on a predetermined cycle, it makes my life even better

preciousoo 5mo ago

I dont uninstall apps that annoy me with notifications, but I do disable them. Most of my notifications these days are news or texts. So be it

dools 5mo ago

“ None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified” So … mission accomplished then? This is pretty much how I would like it to operate.

eks391 5mo ago
That's my thinking too. Do marketers not also have phones, or do they somehow not see how annoying promotions and spam are? There's already so much paid advertising everywhere, and the free advertising with direct notification to the target is obviously going to be abused by these exact types of people. Guardrails must be put up by the transport layer (Google, Apple) so their own image isn't lowered to the image of the abusers that are too keen on promoting their disruptions. Few people want a convenient device that makes life inconvenient[1] [1] I know a few people whose phones constantly beep and flash numerous times a minute, and when on, the top is completely unusable because any notification dismissed is immediately replaced, obscuring those upper buttons again. I don't understand how they tolerate it.

dmitrygr 5mo ago

> 2 to 5 notifications per week is the optimal range for most apps and exceeding it materially increases uninstalls; Wow. Y’all must be much more tolerant of your time being wasted than i am. One notification from an app I didn’t need/request/expect is cause for deletion. 2-5 per week would be enough to go and rate the app 1/5 on the AppStore and actively recommend everyone I know to delete the app. > visibility into all of this is poor by design, and getting worse. Good! I pay Apple big money to protect me (user) from you (abusive app developer, abusive by definition since you talk about my attention as if it were your property)

tonymet 5mo ago

Google/Outlook/etc intervening with email was a good thing and saved email with spam filtering and content ranking. Mobile Carriers have not effectively intervened with phone screening and voice calls are practically dead. Intervening with push notifs could be a good thing. Notifs are approaching the point of uselessness. I turn all off by default now.

iamacyborg 5mo ago
What’s fun is all that “intervening” infrastructure they’ve introduced also doubles up as a big surveillance network.
- tonymet 5mo ago
  how else could it work?

inventor7777 5mo ago

While I have slight worries about what it means for users if Apple and Google notification services go down/censoring, I do appreciate the features that they provide to me as an end user. So many apps use annoying and questionable marketing notifications that I'd say I have about 70% of app notifications disabled globally (because the app itself does not allow disabling notifications / has no granular control). However, it seems that SOME self hosted services can directly notify you without APNS / FCM. As an example, see https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notification-local/ https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notif...

gumby271 5mo ago
Am I understanding correctly that iOS notifications have to go over apns unless on the same local network as the HA server? I do appreciate that android makes this possible for ha and signal (and others) in all cases, it should be up to the user to choose centralizing the connection vs. slightly worse battery life.
- inventor7777 5mo ago
  As far as I understand it, yes, you have to be connected locally. The question is, will it work over Tailscale/WireGuard? I'd assume so, but I've honestly never tested local pushes as I simply haven't needed them :)

QuadmasterXLII 5mo ago

If my phone buzzes and I look at it and the reason was dumb, I delete the offending app and leave a 1 star review. I don’t know which of these steps are loadbearing, but my phone has gotten much quieter.

_HMCB_ 5mo ago

Am I supposed to feel sorry for developers? How did this make it to page one?

extraduder_ire 5mo ago
Seeing how they think about these things can be interesting.

wps 5mo ago

The real solution is to allow users to own their push solution, and for it to become more commonplace among apps to support alternative push providers such as Unified Push. Molly, the FOSS Android Signal client supports this configuration.

drnick1 5mo ago

Personally, I don't see a few permanent connections as a problem. My GrapheneOS phone is degoogled, and therefore apps such as Signal fall back to a WebSocket connection. Battery life is probably somewhat impacted, but I use too few apps to notice. And in any case, this is much better than allowing Google to stick its nose into my business.

gumby271 5mo ago
Yeah I'm disappointed this isn't pointed out in the opening paragraph. It's fair to critique Google for convincing devs that fcm is the only option, and obviously iOS is designed for Apple to do whatever they want, regardless of the owner's wishes, but Android does have other, viable, options. iOS and Android aren't equally bad here.

elzbardico 5mo ago

Oh man... I just wish someone invented some form of organization where workers could negotiate with employers in a more equal footing by doing this in a collective way.

dualvariable 5mo ago

let me pour one out for all my homies in the marketing department...

0x59 5mo ago

I don't think I've got a push notification in awhile. Few months ago I switched to Lineageos and started using the web browser instead of apps. It's peaceful. I still get notifications (SMS, email, calendar, etc) but nothing pushed

DrBenCarson 5mo ago

Vast majority of software should not be able to send a push notification. Send an email if you need to alert me.

netik 5mo ago

This sure sounds like a marketer spending far too many words crying that they've lost surveillance on their customers. Boo hoo, don't care.

LoganDark 5mo ago

I need a feature to block my bank's incessant nagging about cash-back deals while keeping the ones about transactions. Right now on iOS there is no way to do this. And yes, I've explicitly turned off the cash-back deals notifications in my bank app's settings and that is completely ignored.

gumby271 5mo ago
I don't know if there's an iOS equivalent, but Buzzkill on Android is really great for this. I set up filters to hide all the stupid Amazon ad notifications.

dminor 5mo ago

Predictably people are moving back to SMS for notifications. Not as nice for linking to your app but once the user opts in you don't have to deal with the Apple/Google complexity.

iamacyborg 5mo ago
SMS will go exactly the same direction as push as far as being intermediated.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]

passive 5mo ago

For whatever reason, I get very few push notifications on my phone. Compared to my days at Blackberry, it's probably 10% as frequent that I get interrupted by my phone. So good for me. But there's some really scary stuff in here happening to other people that I'm not even aware of.

bofaGuy 5mo ago

I feel like the CAN-SPAM Act should apply to push notifications as well. I don’t know of any case that has tested this.

shevy-java 5mo ago

I live a push-notification free life, aka no push ever. I also saw elderly people receiving such notifications and not knowing why. Then I realised that this system is designed to abuse the elderly, so I am now totally against it.

jacobajit 5mo ago

iOS really needs LLM-based notification filtering. This would take care of promotional notification spam overnight. It would even enable fine-grained user filtering like "notify when - someone is messaging me about plans for today."

awakeasleep 5mo ago
Because Apple makes iOS, they could have a much more rigorous solution, like Google’s. A nondeterministic, energy hungry classifier is inferior to writing a policy to define channels.
- jacobajit 5mo ago
  You really need both. Channels are a great first level, and iOS absolutely needs to implement an Android-tier version of this. But channels continue to be abused, even on Android. When all deterministic controls fail... Secondly, channels are set by the developer (or platform). In an ideal world, I want to define whatever channels I care about, and turn them on/off at will.

bandrami 5mo ago

Also can the browsers finally acknowledge that allowing websites to request the ability to send desktop notifications was a terrible mistake?

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

pslab 5mo ago

[flagged]

newtwentysix 5mo ago

My Android phone has a long list of toggles under notification for each app. I am genuinely interested to make good use of that to optimise what notifications I recieve, but I am clueless about what each of them means . For example: badges, floating notifications, permanent notifications, unified support, alerts, etc.

karlgkk 5mo ago

> that answers to the user rather than to you. You cannot out-shout it, and there is no appeal. "now here's a list of how to get around that!"

simulator5g 5mo ago

This part is factually incorrect: "...a notification lives only in the notification centre, which clears, drops and summarises what passes through it and retains nothing reliably." Your notification center reliably retains information. Something like an inbox does exist, just not in userland: https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/10/fbi-pulled-deleted-signal-messages-from-an-iphone-without-breaking-encryption/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/10/fbi-pulle...

lorenzleutgeb 5mo ago

How does this not mention alternatives? Here: UnifiedPush.org And the author is also wrong that all notifications on my phone go via Google. Signal and Mastodon notifications are set up via Sunup. They seem to have given up. Don't do that please...

lionkor 5mo ago

Turn off all notifications except messaging and see how your day goes. It's not going to kill you. You quickly get used to regularly checking things you actually care about, and the rest has to wait until YOU care. I've been doing this for many years, and none of my friends or colleagues are aware of it, and they don't need to be. Notifications don't help you respond quickly, they just grab your attention from things YOU wanted to do. I haven't checked Discord today yet. I haven't checked my email. Whenever I do want to know if my friends wrote me, or if I have some new bills, or if I need to follow up on something, I will open the respective app and deal with it. I can put my phone next to me for hours and not get distracted.

epicide 5mo ago
> You quickly get used to regularly checking things you actually care about, and the rest has to wait until YOU care. This was the biggest thing for me. Before, I was paranoid that if I turned off notifications, I'd miss something important. As though I didn't miss notifications anyway. Getting used to regularly checking (important) things also has two wonderful side effects (at least it did for me): * My "mental notification system" got better. Because I was less dependent on my phone doing it for me, I developed the skill more on my own. * The apps and services that I checked less and less frequently became more obvious in how unimportant they were to me altogether. I have far fewer apps and accounts now, making me MORE punctual overall.

hennell 5mo ago

IMO they should be doing way more to control push notifications, there's so much more control they could give the user, and many clear violations of their policies. One of the best apps I've bought for android is buzz kill which lets you set rules around notifications. I have cool downs on family chats and social media so it doesn't keep buzzing when things kick off, filter Amazon alerts to only "we're two stops away" and "We've delivered" messages and dismiss the rest. I have custom buzz patterns and sounds for urgent alerts and rules that batch notifications depending what WiFi I'm on, time outs on things that don't matter after a few hours etc. My notifications list is now way smaller and far more relevant. Also quickest way to sort out notifications is to take your phone off silent. Hearing everything coming in, you see more when it you can then decide if the notification should make noise, or exist at all on a per app basis.

mcdonje 5mo ago

The entire architecture here is surprising to me. >an iPhone could not afford to let every installed application maintain its own background poll against a remote server. The proposal...a single persistent TLS connection from each device to Apple, over which any registered third party could deliver alerts. I thought apps were sending notifications locally in the device. Like, if a messaging app receives a message, there's a network call for that. Then if the messaging app wants to tell the user they received a message, it can just hit a local API for that, right? Is the pattern actually that the app makes another network call to the notification service to register the notification, which makes another network call to the device to deliver it?

mrbombastic 5mo ago
yeah this is what author hints at with "Push as a battery problem". Apps are limited by default in what they can do in the background due to this, so most apps are in a suspended state not making network calls when you are not using them. To avoid the app having to keep running this stuff is delegated to OS which tells the app, "hey I have a push for you wake up and handle it!" You can send pushes locally but because of the background limitation it is not practical for unpredictable events like messages coming in.
- mcdonje 5mo ago
  What you're describing seems reasonable, but it doesn't align with what I quoted, unless I'm missing something, which I very well could be. Having apps sleep and a daemon wake them to handle notifications doesn't require all of the notifications coming from Apple.
  - mrbombastic 5mo ago
    Not sure i understand. Sure it doesn’t require it but Apple doesn’t trust you to handle it because you’ll probably drain the battery or spam the user or whatever, that is Apple MO, putting themselves in the middle so they can control the experience. The single persistent connection is just to receive pushes, there is still some daemon controlled by apple in charged of dispatching to correct app.

avazhi 5mo ago

I've had all notifications turned off expect for my immediate family (parents, wife) for years now. I'd get rid of my phone before going back to getting buzzed and dinged constantly.

autoexec 5mo ago

What I'm doing: leaving them all off

annagio_ 5mo ago

Isn't this a strategic going for years now, throwing random notifications to make the user use more the app? I for once, block notifications from apps I don't want, because I don't like getting bombed with stupid ads etc.

braiamp 5mo ago

[dead]

AlexandrB 5mo ago

> What the marketer can see > Your visibility into all of this is poor by design, and getting worse. Great! This article is all good news, it seems.

limaoscarjuliet 5mo ago

The first thing I do on every new phone is to turn off 99% of notifications. Messaging ones and email are first to go. I cannot stand the constant beep-beep.

thanksobama 5mo ago

Whatever has replaced the Bulk Collection of Telephony Metadata Under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act informs the architecture of the Apple Push Notification, Firebase Cloud Messaging, etc. Apple owns the persistent connection to every iPhone, and only APNs can wake your app. So "self-hosting" here means running your own provider (the backend that decides what to send and hands it to APNs) instead of paying a third party like Firebase Cloud Messaging, OneSignal, or Pusher to do that for you. The last mile is never yours however. Any architecture that routes everyone's traffic through a small number of identity-aware intermediaries is, by construction, a bulk-metadata collection system waiting for a legal instrument. [2] In December 2023 Senator Ron Wyden disclosed that the U.S. government and foreign governments had secretly compelled Google and Apple to turn over information from push notifications, including communications metadata and sometimes content. A detail that should bother any developer: app developers have no way to stop the practice if they want to send notifications on the platforms iPhones and Android rely on. Apple had been gagged from disclosing it until the program became public, after which it said it was updating its transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests. So the architectural hypothesis isn't speculative — it's the confirmed mechanism, differing from Section 215 mainly in domain (apps vs. calls) and legal vehicle (ordinary subpoenas, FISA orders, and NSLs rather than the specific business-records theory of §215) [1] "Its just metadata". Thanks Obama! (joking of course, no single individual is responsible for these things, it is our collective political will and its the best we can do unfortunately) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUdm0QMDM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUdm0QMDM0 [2] https://epic.org/sen-wyden-reveals-government-surveillance-of-smartphone-push-notifications/ https://epic.org/sen-wyden-reveals-government-surveillance-o...

megous 5mo ago

There are apps that need 100% notification delivery reliability (in a sense that OS or delivery server itself will not be allowed to decide to just drop PN for policy reasons). I guess Google can only "solve" this (by simply not passing them through any "classification") for their own apps only? For some android phone brands delivery reliability is like 40-50%. Some brands are better (reaching 80%, still bad) some very bad (usually the chinese brands, for some reason). And the user has no say in this. They can't say: deliver every notification without classification. Or "allow this app to wakeup whenever it wants". Everything is babysat by the great overseer, even if you write the app yourself for yourself. Have fun writing a telephony app that receives only 50% of calls. :D

k_plankenhorn 5mo ago

I'm building a productivity app right now that lives entirely on the web right now because I can't justify native development costs yet. The daily nudge (i.e., you have 47 free minutes, and this task has been sitting for 14 days) is the core retention metric. This only works as a push notification; emails get ignored. The web app sends an email. V2 goes native specifically for this reason. The article's point about leading with the fact rather than the brand point is useful. The notification payload I'm designing already leads with the concrete numbers.

nathan_compton 5mo ago

Smart phones should absolutely allow you to lie to apps about what permissions they have, to feed apps fake data, and to basically control every single thing the app sees about the phone and the user. The fact that they do not do this reveals that phone makers are sort of market makers between app makers and customers, creating an environment which, in a certain sense, is a neutral ground between these two types of "users."

moritzwarhier 5mo ago

Apple and Google are pushing push notifications? No way! Pun aside, it makes sense for a notification framework including a notification delivery network to be built into these mobile OSes, because the alternative (letting applications run arbitrary background services) is usually worse.

davidgh 5mo ago

My frustration is with services like Uber, Bolt, Airbnb, etc. where you need the push for core services and then the provides use them to slip in spam.

bbarn 5mo ago
Uber is especially bad here. I live rural, but when I travel I use it (and uber eats sometimes) when I'm out of town. At this point I uninstall the app and only install it when I know I might use it because it's so invasive with marketing crap. Even more annoying is the fact that why yes, I would love a burger delivered but there's literally nothing your service can get me to my home.
willk 5mo ago
Apple/Google has effectively made notification worthless because they allow services to abuse notifications. I wish they respected my time/attention more.

semiinfinitely 5mo ago

technology should be silent

sitzkrieg 5mo ago

apple can’t even make a working alarm clock on a smartphone

willk 5mo ago
Mine works, what are you talking about?
- sitzkrieg 4mo ago
  1000s of people have their alarm on ios go off completely silent daily. mine did it 6 days in a week before i got a physical alarm clock. and yes, all the usual settings are correct. more H1Bs please!

just_some_guy_2 5mo ago

Interesting article. When I was young, the household would receive a bunch of physical catalogs from shops in or near my hometown. We would all sit around the coffee table going through them and looking for good deals. If all these catalogs had a build-in tracker so that the sender could magically measure how long the catalog was in the mailbox, if it was read before ending up in the trash, how many people in the household saw the catalog, how many pages were seen and so on... we would all have freaked out and burned the catalogs up at once! But now that kind of surveillance is just normal. Sad.

simjnd 5mo ago

> Email gives you layout control via HTML; push gives you a small structured payload and little control over the collapsed lock-screen view beyond the platform's templates Thank god for this. I absolutely do NOT want my notification center to become a playground for marketing people to try to manipulate my attention even more than they already do. Every notification would have flashy animations and should adhere to the brand guidelines of whatever app or company is sending them.