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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

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 4mo ago
I disable all group chat notifications too, only direct messages trigger notifications for me.
e40 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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”?
    - e40 4mo ago
      It wasn't much time at all. Honestly, the push back on this always baffles me. And when I had an office, I closed (not locked) the door to signify I was in a focus mode. I don't get your point.
  - exmadscientist 4mo ago
    The other problem with Slack is that it just straight up... doesn't do what you tell it to. I have a set of notification settings that work for me. Slack goes ahead and just does something else, and you simply can't fix it to do what it's told. (Or couldn't, anyway; I've been off Slack for a while.)
  - e40 4mo ago
    The idea that software like Slack could be setup as "one size fits all" is just ludicrous to me. We have options because different people require different settings.
- fastasucan 4mo ago
  If you are very present on slack, ofcourse you dont feel that you are interruped.
  - e40 4mo ago
    I don't know what that means. I have no audible sounds from notifications. They don't go to my phone, with few exceptions. I get no popups. Yet, I am responsive. It was trivial to set up.
- hnlmorg 4mo ago
  For Slack, I find just changing the default notification sound to a simple and subtle ding works well. When I’m focused, I don’t hear it because it’s too subtle. But when I’m not concentrating on anything, it’s more noticeable and I don’t mind the distraction. This might not work for everyone (“YMMV” and all), but I’ve personally found it a very effective yet simple solution.
pants2 4mo ago
The biggest problem are apps that do both. For example, I want Uber to notify me when my driver has arrived, but I don't want it to notify me when they have a special 10% discount on my next 5 rides. It's not straightforward to block one but not the other.
- liotier 4mo ago
  The user legitimately considers the application as hostile - hence sandboxing... Notification spam filtering is now the obvious need at the sandbox's edge, with the whole customizable arsenal we have come to expect for our inbound mail. Of course, Google will not cooperate with anything likely to reduce sacro-sanct engagement !
  - nixosbestos 4mo ago
    Except that they did. Android has notification channels. Now, I suppose we could argue that Google could be more ham-fisted about forcing apps to use them, but that's murky. In fact, Uber on Android does use these notification channels. I just have "All Promotions & Recommendation notifications" disabled, and then "Taking a ride" channel enabled.
    - MiddleEndian 4mo ago
      >Now, I suppose we could argue that Google could be more ham-fisted about forcing apps to use them, but that's murky. I disagree. What the is the point of forcing everyone to use the Google Play Store (or whatever app store on iOS) if the store doesn't stop spammers? People complain about Uber, but Lyft does the same shit. I got a promotional notification from Lyft and could not disable it without disabling the main notifications that tell me when drivers were arriving. If app stores were useful instead of just rent-seeking, they would kick Lyft off until they stopped doing that.
  - pants2 4mo ago
    I definitely run all my emails through an LLM filter and wish I could do the same for push notifications!
latexr 4mo ago
To your list, I would add a calendar and reminders app.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
itopaloglu83 4mo ago
I would say the same applies to background processing as well. A random app that I don’t interact with launching every minute and wasting everything from battery to network bandwidth is simply not acceptable, and most of the time they’re loading adds or doing some other stuff that serves me no good.
- donmcronald 4mo ago
  I wish I could set this as the user. Apple ties background app refresh to the frequency of use, but that sucks for self-hosted photo backups. I use Immich and I don't open it too often, so Apple breaks my chosen backup system for my photos.
jillesvangurp 4mo ago
Apple and Google failed to make push notifications usable for the past decade. Most important notifications drown in a sea of absolutely irrelevant nonsense. It's a very primitive mechanism where many apps compete for very little screen real estate. Beyond "something happened!" there isn't a whole lot of information in most push notifications. They are mostly not very actionable and very vague about what actually happened. And "something happened!" just isn't very useful information to me. This has de-valued the whole notion of having notifications. Whenever something interesting actually does flash by, I often miss it or can't find it back. The push notification UX is just beyond terrible and it just got worse over time as app developers tried abusing their super power of being able to interrupt the user at will and Apple and Google tried to get on top of that. The net result is something that's very mediocre for the handful of valid uses I have left for notifications. My list is similar to yours. Things like bank approvals, 2FA stuff, etc. are useful mainly as deeplinks into apps. But other than that, it's just not worth dropping whatever I'm doing and staring at my phone. The most used apps on my Android phone (older Google pixel model) are Firefox and gmail and just a handful of other things. As a notification channel, my email inbox is actually far more useful than mobile push notifications. They are more actionable and informative. And I can individually unsubscribe them or filter them out and easily find them back. Most apps can do both and that makes the push notifications inferior and redundant.
- iamacyborg 4mo ago
  > The most used apps on my Android phone (older Google pixel model) are Firefox and gmail and just a handful of other things. As a notification channel, my email inbox is actually far more useful than mobile push notifications. They are more actionable and informative. And I can individually unsubscribe them or filter them out and easily find them back. There’s also substantially more filtering happening in the inbox which is mostly useful from a user perspective. Yahoo literally wrote a paper more than a decade ago showing how they can model predictive causal chains for emails they expect you to receive, as an example. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2740908.2741694 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2740908.2741694
- asdff 4mo ago
  Gee lets take a 5 inch screen phone and have every notification stack up in 1 inch worth of space. I really hate ios18. Too bad ios26 is even worse.
dylan604 4mo ago
> Phone, Messages At this point, I'm pretty much in some form of DND at all times. I have a very small list of people that I allow the device to notify me at any time for calls/messages. Everyone else gets silenced and I'll get back to them when I choose. All other apps have notifications disabled and I'm constantly nagged about it when using those apps
hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
Yeah, this entire article is pretty transparent that it's from the sender perspective, and worried about platforms taking over "sender control". Who is he kidding? The vast majority of apps have absolutely proven they can't be trusted to respect your attention. From my perspective, the more roadblocks the platforms put between unnecessary notifications and my phone, the better. And I don't think Apple or Google are some sort of heroes here, but I do believe their incentives better align with mine than the marketing department of some app I was forced to download because I bought a ticket once or something like that.
- iamalizard 4mo ago
  > From my perspective, the more roadblocks the platforms put between unnecessary notifications and my phone, the better. I know lots of apps behave badly when it comes to notifications but I'd still prefer if the apps controlled the level of notifications they sent. I could, of course, reduce that client-side, but I don't see why I'd want Google or Apple or any other intermediary see or control the notifications. If an app behaves inappropriately, I could uninstall it. If a gatekeeper like Google or Apple prevent an app from sending me notifications, I'd have to change my OS, usually my hardware, too.
  - nickburns 4mo ago
    TFA discusses at-length how APNs and FCM are necessary intermediaries regardless, effectively creating a technical duopoly on 'push'. We all agree it would've been preferable for things not to have gotten this way, but here we are.
    - iamalizard 4mo ago
      Here we are, but let's think of ways to change it. I hope that even if some people start thinking differently, in terms of changing the status quo, we could reach a better future.
  - Arainach 4mo ago
    This forces millions of users to individually monitor and fix dozens or hundreds of apps all the time - something most don't have time for and leads to an awful experience. Centralized controls are better for the user.
pseudosavant 4mo ago
Exactly. Senders have earned the questionable reputation that they have because they rabidly want your attention whether you want to give it or not. I used the Southwest Airlines app recently and allowed notifications so that I could find out about things like delays and gate changes (both of which happened on my trip). Less than a week later I'm getting ads for travel "deals" pushed as notifications. Unsurprisingly, it was difficult to find the notification setting, which was on their website, not even in the app.
kevstev 4mo ago
I'm personally just at messages. And even then I make it clear I respond when I want to. Only phone rings/notifications I get are for those in my contact list. Take your phones back. Life is immensely better these days.
intrasight 4mo ago
Phone, Calendar, Health - that's it for me
hedora 4mo ago
I've noticed a priority inversion in recent iOS. Want to send me an SMS that matches a ban-list regex from a third party app, from a foreign phone number / obvious spam farm? No problem. The app to block you was auto-uninstalled, and the iOS notification filter will mark your message with the highest possible priority. Want to continue a 300 message thread that I've been responding to? You're listed as my emergency contact, and called multiple times? Fuck right off. Straight to spam. It's almost enough to get me to carry a second dumb phone or grapheneos device just so I can text and receive phone calls.
OptionOfT 4mo ago
I have it turned off for my bank. For some reason Bank of America doesn't allow me to sign in with Face ID. I always need to get a text. Only reason I keep them is because I like a brick and mortar bank nearby.
deleted 4mo ago
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svachalek 4mo ago
For me I definitely need Calendar and sometimes Clock (alarm). iOS is constantly freaking me out by prompting me whether or not I want to continue receiving notifications from those apps. To me those apps exist entirely for the purpose of generating notifications and it terrifies me that by repeatedly popping stupid questions like that, I'm going to accidentally answer wrong and effectively delete my most important app accidentally. It boggles my mind that somewhere someone thought Clock and Peggle were basically on equal footing here.
Grimblewald 4mo ago
Your position is that of any normal human. Google is committed to evil however, just look at how playstore notifications are tied to sales spam. Want payment notifivations? Gotta take the ads as well, not seperate toggles, one toggle. Drink liquid shit you tech peasant. Oh? this hostility drove you to f-droid? We'll unilaterally decide every device r belong to us, so we can disable competition we dont approve of. Welcome back to the liquid shit trough, peasant.
Gigachad 4mo ago
It's absolutely disgusting how most tech companies use notifications as an advertising or addiction building channel. On the rare times I use an app like uber eats, I uninstall it directly after because the app sends multiple adverts a day through the notifications. I want a notification purely to tell me the driver is almost here. And nothing else.
xnx 4mo ago
Attention(/time) is our most valuable resource. Protect it ruthlessly.
Helmut10001 4mo ago
I have my phone always in Do Not Disturb. That's it.
bruce511 4mo ago
"Marketing never met a communication system they didn't want to co-opt" (I'm reminded of this every time a client want "WhatsApp support" in their (commercial) app, so they can "communicate with customers".) But equally every user will have a different subset of apps they want notifications for. For example shift workers need to know when they've been allocated a shift. Or when a shift has opened up (because someone scheduled failed to arrive etc.) One group of users consider this really important, another group of users treat it as spam. But, per the rule above, unfortunately "useful notifications" can easily be subverted by marketing notifications. Yes I want to know my delivery driver is outside, no I don't want to know that you're running a special this week. Unfortunately there's no way to solve this problem technically. Bad actors can (and definitely do) behave badly. But ultimately the system should work for "good citizens". In other words, the user should ultimately determine what they want to see of not. And if an app has "notifications on or off" as the only option then the user should ultimately determine that setting. Not Google. Not Apple. Building society around the lowest-common-denominator just ends up sucking for everyone. We should actively promote good behavior, while allowing bad behavior to be punished. Not just banning everything "because it might be bad".
quality_life 4mo ago
There ought to be a flag to group all such notifications together and present them when the user wants to get to those notifications.
derefr 4mo ago
You're conflating "push notifications" with "being alerted about push notifications." I have many "important but not urgent" apps on my phone configured to just silently add their push notifications into iOS's notification center. With an app configured to do notifications like this, no banner shows up at the time the app's notifications are delivered; and these notifications don't even show up visibly on the lock screen. You only see this type of notification if you choose to actively scroll down past the "timely" notifications that do get delivered onto your lock screen, to "catch up" on all your notifications. Basically, these notifications are relegated to an "email inbox" that you can check or not check as you like. But unlike your email inbox, you can go "inbox zero" on your notification "inbox" whenever you like without worry, since notifications (unlike email) are inherently prohibited from being a critical path in an app workflow.
- MarleTangible 4mo ago
  Just curious, what do you do with the increasing number of companies that use push notifications as a form of advertising venue, and how do you differentiate the security warning notification from your camera app from their special weekly annual sale notification? The marginal cost of each notification is so low that companies simply spam users nonstop, and their A/B tests shows that the revenue is increasing. What's being lost though is that we're getting more and more agitated with these brands and their uncapped malicious behaviors. This is also true with their UI and UX as well, they keep adding banners with incredibly small close buttons, because someone will continue with the shopping after accidently missing the tiny button, and that's an added sale, who cares about 99% of users who are fuming with dissatisfaction, what are they going to throw away their $200-300 smart home device because companies abuse them?
  - aftbit 4mo ago
    On my Android, I aggressively mute or uninstall any apps that send push advertisements. I haven't seen one in more than 6 months now. If they think they need to advertise to me, I think I need to do without them.
pndy 4mo ago
I went even further and my small set of the most important applications runs in the background - rest doesn't have that privilege. I've treated my spare Samsung phone same way. I also don't use Siri either beyond setting timers and lights in home and every application is also excluded from being "suggested". Apple for 14 years didn't bother to add support for Polish so it basically remains useless.
bambax 4mo ago
Exactly. Same for me, except I don't have an iPhone and therefore no "Apple Health". I will take care of my own health, or not, on my own. So I would say: only humans can send me notifications. That includes me in the case of 2FA. But no machine ever, for any reason.
mikaeluman 4mo ago
Spot on.
nottorp 4mo ago
Health? Why, are you worried you'll miss the notification that you have a heart attack? As for Whatsapp, maybe you're not in enough group chats that you still allow notifications...
- jve 4mo ago
  You can mute group chats in whatsapp.
8fingerlouie 4mo ago
I classify them even further. I have broadly the same list as you do, but stuff like WhatsApp, Messenger, and other "non primary" communications platforms have silent notifications in the sense that they're not allowed on the lock screen or Home Screen. They simply display a notification counter. Stuff I care about that I can't do anything about "right now" are allowed on the lock screen but quietly. That includes messages from the kids schools. Most is not even that important, like field trips "next week", but once in a while there's an "important" message I need to deal with.
nicman23 4mo ago
if a app messages me it is uninstalled. we have too many installed apps anyways.
ivanjermakov 4mo ago
I also allow emails, but I'm very agressive at filtering promotion/junk emails with skip inbox rules: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en
pjmlp 4mo ago
Fully agree, the apps are to blame for misusing notifications for marketing and ads, they are the ones doing this to themselves.
gus_massa 4mo ago
My bank likes to show offers, like a 10% discount in tires, but I have no car. Perhaps tree or four irrelevant messages per day. I have MouseTimer that is an alarm that is nice to show to kids when they must wait or do something for 10 or 20 minutes. It should be able to ring and sometimes show notifications.
peterspath 4mo ago
Same: Phone, Messages, Calendar, Apple Health... nothing else can send me notifications. On my work I also disabled all notifications except for the calendar. Even slack message our main tool for communication is not allowed to send notifications. It is almost a productivity hack :P
grvdrm 4mo ago
I agree with your points. That said, my view is now (not novel, or unique) that I am not the customer in so many cases. Any app or platform with the slightest hint of an advertising end-game restructures my usage as the product. The customer is instead the sender (or advertiser). So, I can't expect ideal app behavior and usage based on my intentions because I'm sold (as the product) rather than the other way around. Maybe a cynical view, and there are exceptions, but don't think I'm far off.
hgoel 4mo ago
Might as well use a dumb phone I don't get what you guys are doing to be so bothered by notifications. I get them on my wirst and even then it isn't enough to take away mental bandwidth.
everdrive 4mo ago
Maybe it's for the best. The best practice is to have as few apps as possible. The moment an app is abusive with notifications, you know it's time to drop the app anyhow. A lot of people need that one final push to drop the app, so this could help.
miki123211 4mo ago
The worst are apps that bundle genuinely urgent notifications with maketing brain-manipulation promotional crap. Uber is a notorious example. I do genuinely want Uber notifications for when I use Uber. I do not care about whatever promotion it pushes at me.
grishka 4mo ago
My notification setup is more elaborate (for one, I do keep social media notifications on, but silent) but yeah I agree in general. It frightens me seeing some other people's notification shades where they have 20+ spam notifications from all kinds of things that I wouldn't even consider installing an app for, and they're somehow fine with it.
amelius 4mo ago
> Apps allowed to receive push notifications > Phone, Messages, Whatsapp, Apple Health, [brand] bank. Anyone else annoyed by the fact that you can set up do-no-disturb, with exceptions for certain phone numbers, but it doesn't work for apps like WhatsApp?
- scope2093 4mo ago
  I remember a while back I also had this issue on iOS (maybe around 2022 or so), though lately seems to be solved and works as one can hope so. When you're making the exceptions, do you explicitly input phone numbers or some other method? I selected contacts from my contacts list and it does the job. This is for iOS in my case. I'm not familiar with Android, so cannot give any input there..
  - amelius 4mo ago
    On Android I can "star" certain contacts.
burnte 4mo ago
I totally agree. Right now the apps that can notify me are phone, text, email, what's app, and a few bank apps. You are 100% right about turning it off on everything else. I also stopped doing store loyalty cards about 7 years ago and it's been fantastic. I actually get a lot less junk mail and spam/"legit" marketing emails. I don't have a gob of cards to sort through. Corporations should not speak unless spoken to.
mannanj 4mo ago
"Notifications are like alarms other people set for you" Naval Ravikant said this years ago and it stuck with me. Taking a page from your book, I have 0 notifications. I practice notification 0 and have done it for about a half decade now, and it's absolutely liberating and freeing. I found I needed to remove the apps from my phone Home Screen to feel this, as otherwise even their icon presence when opening my phone triggers dopamine loops. When I need to be pinged, I use boundaries and expectations set with those who could interrupt what I'm doing with something important enough. Those people get to know where I'm at, how to reach me, etc and mostly what I do to help them is set them as contacts so my phone lets their calls through beyond voicemail, and I have physical locations accessible to them + times through the day where I'll check in.
rafterydj 4mo ago
100% agree. The spam problem is, I fear, a symptom of the walled gardens of Google and Apple not being very judiciously maintained. They continue to push the bare minimum of notification controls out for the user, but double deal when they allow e.g. custom app-defined notification lists. Something like this would simply never fly if the Unix philosophy were an actual consideration in their product design.

DanielHB 4mo ago

I disable all group chat notifications too, only direct messages trigger notifications for me.

e40 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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”?
  - e40 4mo ago
    It wasn't much time at all. Honestly, the push back on this always baffles me. And when I had an office, I closed (not locked) the door to signify I was in a focus mode. I don't get your point.
- exmadscientist 4mo ago
  The other problem with Slack is that it just straight up... doesn't do what you tell it to. I have a set of notification settings that work for me. Slack goes ahead and just does something else, and you simply can't fix it to do what it's told. (Or couldn't, anyway; I've been off Slack for a while.)
- e40 4mo ago
  The idea that software like Slack could be setup as "one size fits all" is just ludicrous to me. We have options because different people require different settings.
fastasucan 4mo ago
If you are very present on slack, ofcourse you dont feel that you are interruped.
- e40 4mo ago
  I don't know what that means. I have no audible sounds from notifications. They don't go to my phone, with few exceptions. I get no popups. Yet, I am responsive. It was trivial to set up.
hnlmorg 4mo ago
For Slack, I find just changing the default notification sound to a simple and subtle ding works well. When I’m focused, I don’t hear it because it’s too subtle. But when I’m not concentrating on anything, it’s more noticeable and I don’t mind the distraction. This might not work for everyone (“YMMV” and all), but I’ve personally found it a very effective yet simple solution.

pants2 4mo ago

The biggest problem are apps that do both. For example, I want Uber to notify me when my driver has arrived, but I don't want it to notify me when they have a special 10% discount on my next 5 rides. It's not straightforward to block one but not the other.

liotier 4mo ago
The user legitimately considers the application as hostile - hence sandboxing... Notification spam filtering is now the obvious need at the sandbox's edge, with the whole customizable arsenal we have come to expect for our inbound mail. Of course, Google will not cooperate with anything likely to reduce sacro-sanct engagement !
- nixosbestos 4mo ago
  Except that they did. Android has notification channels. Now, I suppose we could argue that Google could be more ham-fisted about forcing apps to use them, but that's murky. In fact, Uber on Android does use these notification channels. I just have "All Promotions & Recommendation notifications" disabled, and then "Taking a ride" channel enabled.
  - MiddleEndian 4mo ago
    >Now, I suppose we could argue that Google could be more ham-fisted about forcing apps to use them, but that's murky. I disagree. What the is the point of forcing everyone to use the Google Play Store (or whatever app store on iOS) if the store doesn't stop spammers? People complain about Uber, but Lyft does the same shit. I got a promotional notification from Lyft and could not disable it without disabling the main notifications that tell me when drivers were arriving. If app stores were useful instead of just rent-seeking, they would kick Lyft off until they stopped doing that.
- pants2 4mo ago
  I definitely run all my emails through an LLM filter and wish I could do the same for push notifications!

latexr 4mo ago

To your list, I would add a calendar and reminders app.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

itopaloglu83 4mo ago

I would say the same applies to background processing as well. A random app that I don’t interact with launching every minute and wasting everything from battery to network bandwidth is simply not acceptable, and most of the time they’re loading adds or doing some other stuff that serves me no good.

donmcronald 4mo ago
I wish I could set this as the user. Apple ties background app refresh to the frequency of use, but that sucks for self-hosted photo backups. I use Immich and I don't open it too often, so Apple breaks my chosen backup system for my photos.

jillesvangurp 4mo ago

Apple and Google failed to make push notifications usable for the past decade. Most important notifications drown in a sea of absolutely irrelevant nonsense. It's a very primitive mechanism where many apps compete for very little screen real estate. Beyond "something happened!" there isn't a whole lot of information in most push notifications. They are mostly not very actionable and very vague about what actually happened. And "something happened!" just isn't very useful information to me. This has de-valued the whole notion of having notifications. Whenever something interesting actually does flash by, I often miss it or can't find it back. The push notification UX is just beyond terrible and it just got worse over time as app developers tried abusing their super power of being able to interrupt the user at will and Apple and Google tried to get on top of that. The net result is something that's very mediocre for the handful of valid uses I have left for notifications. My list is similar to yours. Things like bank approvals, 2FA stuff, etc. are useful mainly as deeplinks into apps. But other than that, it's just not worth dropping whatever I'm doing and staring at my phone. The most used apps on my Android phone (older Google pixel model) are Firefox and gmail and just a handful of other things. As a notification channel, my email inbox is actually far more useful than mobile push notifications. They are more actionable and informative. And I can individually unsubscribe them or filter them out and easily find them back. Most apps can do both and that makes the push notifications inferior and redundant.

iamacyborg 4mo ago
> The most used apps on my Android phone (older Google pixel model) are Firefox and gmail and just a handful of other things. As a notification channel, my email inbox is actually far more useful than mobile push notifications. They are more actionable and informative. And I can individually unsubscribe them or filter them out and easily find them back. There’s also substantially more filtering happening in the inbox which is mostly useful from a user perspective. Yahoo literally wrote a paper more than a decade ago showing how they can model predictive causal chains for emails they expect you to receive, as an example. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2740908.2741694 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2740908.2741694
asdff 4mo ago
Gee lets take a 5 inch screen phone and have every notification stack up in 1 inch worth of space. I really hate ios18. Too bad ios26 is even worse.

dylan604 4mo ago

> Phone, Messages At this point, I'm pretty much in some form of DND at all times. I have a very small list of people that I allow the device to notify me at any time for calls/messages. Everyone else gets silenced and I'll get back to them when I choose. All other apps have notifications disabled and I'm constantly nagged about it when using those apps

hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago

Yeah, this entire article is pretty transparent that it's from the sender perspective, and worried about platforms taking over "sender control". Who is he kidding? The vast majority of apps have absolutely proven they can't be trusted to respect your attention. From my perspective, the more roadblocks the platforms put between unnecessary notifications and my phone, the better. And I don't think Apple or Google are some sort of heroes here, but I do believe their incentives better align with mine than the marketing department of some app I was forced to download because I bought a ticket once or something like that.

iamalizard 4mo ago
> From my perspective, the more roadblocks the platforms put between unnecessary notifications and my phone, the better. I know lots of apps behave badly when it comes to notifications but I'd still prefer if the apps controlled the level of notifications they sent. I could, of course, reduce that client-side, but I don't see why I'd want Google or Apple or any other intermediary see or control the notifications. If an app behaves inappropriately, I could uninstall it. If a gatekeeper like Google or Apple prevent an app from sending me notifications, I'd have to change my OS, usually my hardware, too.
- nickburns 4mo ago
  TFA discusses at-length how APNs and FCM are necessary intermediaries regardless, effectively creating a technical duopoly on 'push'. We all agree it would've been preferable for things not to have gotten this way, but here we are.
  - iamalizard 4mo ago
    Here we are, but let's think of ways to change it. I hope that even if some people start thinking differently, in terms of changing the status quo, we could reach a better future.
- Arainach 4mo ago
  This forces millions of users to individually monitor and fix dozens or hundreds of apps all the time - something most don't have time for and leads to an awful experience. Centralized controls are better for the user.

pseudosavant 4mo ago

Exactly. Senders have earned the questionable reputation that they have because they rabidly want your attention whether you want to give it or not. I used the Southwest Airlines app recently and allowed notifications so that I could find out about things like delays and gate changes (both of which happened on my trip). Less than a week later I'm getting ads for travel "deals" pushed as notifications. Unsurprisingly, it was difficult to find the notification setting, which was on their website, not even in the app.

kevstev 4mo ago

I'm personally just at messages. And even then I make it clear I respond when I want to. Only phone rings/notifications I get are for those in my contact list. Take your phones back. Life is immensely better these days.

intrasight 4mo ago

Phone, Calendar, Health - that's it for me

hedora 4mo ago

I've noticed a priority inversion in recent iOS. Want to send me an SMS that matches a ban-list regex from a third party app, from a foreign phone number / obvious spam farm? No problem. The app to block you was auto-uninstalled, and the iOS notification filter will mark your message with the highest possible priority. Want to continue a 300 message thread that I've been responding to? You're listed as my emergency contact, and called multiple times? Fuck right off. Straight to spam. It's almost enough to get me to carry a second dumb phone or grapheneos device just so I can text and receive phone calls.

OptionOfT 4mo ago

I have it turned off for my bank. For some reason Bank of America doesn't allow me to sign in with Face ID. I always need to get a text. Only reason I keep them is because I like a brick and mortar bank nearby.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

svachalek 4mo ago

For me I definitely need Calendar and sometimes Clock (alarm). iOS is constantly freaking me out by prompting me whether or not I want to continue receiving notifications from those apps. To me those apps exist entirely for the purpose of generating notifications and it terrifies me that by repeatedly popping stupid questions like that, I'm going to accidentally answer wrong and effectively delete my most important app accidentally. It boggles my mind that somewhere someone thought Clock and Peggle were basically on equal footing here.

Grimblewald 4mo ago

Your position is that of any normal human. Google is committed to evil however, just look at how playstore notifications are tied to sales spam. Want payment notifivations? Gotta take the ads as well, not seperate toggles, one toggle. Drink liquid shit you tech peasant. Oh? this hostility drove you to f-droid? We'll unilaterally decide every device r belong to us, so we can disable competition we dont approve of. Welcome back to the liquid shit trough, peasant.

Gigachad 4mo ago

It's absolutely disgusting how most tech companies use notifications as an advertising or addiction building channel. On the rare times I use an app like uber eats, I uninstall it directly after because the app sends multiple adverts a day through the notifications. I want a notification purely to tell me the driver is almost here. And nothing else.

xnx 4mo ago

Attention(/time) is our most valuable resource. Protect it ruthlessly.

Helmut10001 4mo ago

I have my phone always in Do Not Disturb. That's it.

bruce511 4mo ago

"Marketing never met a communication system they didn't want to co-opt" (I'm reminded of this every time a client want "WhatsApp support" in their (commercial) app, so they can "communicate with customers".) But equally every user will have a different subset of apps they want notifications for. For example shift workers need to know when they've been allocated a shift. Or when a shift has opened up (because someone scheduled failed to arrive etc.) One group of users consider this really important, another group of users treat it as spam. But, per the rule above, unfortunately "useful notifications" can easily be subverted by marketing notifications. Yes I want to know my delivery driver is outside, no I don't want to know that you're running a special this week. Unfortunately there's no way to solve this problem technically. Bad actors can (and definitely do) behave badly. But ultimately the system should work for "good citizens". In other words, the user should ultimately determine what they want to see of not. And if an app has "notifications on or off" as the only option then the user should ultimately determine that setting. Not Google. Not Apple. Building society around the lowest-common-denominator just ends up sucking for everyone. We should actively promote good behavior, while allowing bad behavior to be punished. Not just banning everything "because it might be bad".

quality_life 4mo ago

There ought to be a flag to group all such notifications together and present them when the user wants to get to those notifications.

derefr 4mo ago

You're conflating "push notifications" with "being alerted about push notifications." I have many "important but not urgent" apps on my phone configured to just silently add their push notifications into iOS's notification center. With an app configured to do notifications like this, no banner shows up at the time the app's notifications are delivered; and these notifications don't even show up visibly on the lock screen. You only see this type of notification if you choose to actively scroll down past the "timely" notifications that do get delivered onto your lock screen, to "catch up" on all your notifications. Basically, these notifications are relegated to an "email inbox" that you can check or not check as you like. But unlike your email inbox, you can go "inbox zero" on your notification "inbox" whenever you like without worry, since notifications (unlike email) are inherently prohibited from being a critical path in an app workflow.

MarleTangible 4mo ago
Just curious, what do you do with the increasing number of companies that use push notifications as a form of advertising venue, and how do you differentiate the security warning notification from your camera app from their special weekly annual sale notification? The marginal cost of each notification is so low that companies simply spam users nonstop, and their A/B tests shows that the revenue is increasing. What's being lost though is that we're getting more and more agitated with these brands and their uncapped malicious behaviors. This is also true with their UI and UX as well, they keep adding banners with incredibly small close buttons, because someone will continue with the shopping after accidently missing the tiny button, and that's an added sale, who cares about 99% of users who are fuming with dissatisfaction, what are they going to throw away their $200-300 smart home device because companies abuse them?
- aftbit 4mo ago
  On my Android, I aggressively mute or uninstall any apps that send push advertisements. I haven't seen one in more than 6 months now. If they think they need to advertise to me, I think I need to do without them.

pndy 4mo ago

I went even further and my small set of the most important applications runs in the background - rest doesn't have that privilege. I've treated my spare Samsung phone same way. I also don't use Siri either beyond setting timers and lights in home and every application is also excluded from being "suggested". Apple for 14 years didn't bother to add support for Polish so it basically remains useless.

bambax 4mo ago

Exactly. Same for me, except I don't have an iPhone and therefore no "Apple Health". I will take care of my own health, or not, on my own. So I would say: only humans can send me notifications. That includes me in the case of 2FA. But no machine ever, for any reason.

mikaeluman 4mo ago

Spot on.

nottorp 4mo ago

Health? Why, are you worried you'll miss the notification that you have a heart attack? As for Whatsapp, maybe you're not in enough group chats that you still allow notifications...

jve 4mo ago
You can mute group chats in whatsapp.

8fingerlouie 4mo ago

I classify them even further. I have broadly the same list as you do, but stuff like WhatsApp, Messenger, and other "non primary" communications platforms have silent notifications in the sense that they're not allowed on the lock screen or Home Screen. They simply display a notification counter. Stuff I care about that I can't do anything about "right now" are allowed on the lock screen but quietly. That includes messages from the kids schools. Most is not even that important, like field trips "next week", but once in a while there's an "important" message I need to deal with.

nicman23 4mo ago

if a app messages me it is uninstalled. we have too many installed apps anyways.

ivanjermakov 4mo ago

I also allow emails, but I'm very agressive at filtering promotion/junk emails with skip inbox rules: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en

pjmlp 4mo ago

Fully agree, the apps are to blame for misusing notifications for marketing and ads, they are the ones doing this to themselves.

gus_massa 4mo ago

My bank likes to show offers, like a 10% discount in tires, but I have no car. Perhaps tree or four irrelevant messages per day. I have MouseTimer that is an alarm that is nice to show to kids when they must wait or do something for 10 or 20 minutes. It should be able to ring and sometimes show notifications.

peterspath 4mo ago

Same: Phone, Messages, Calendar, Apple Health... nothing else can send me notifications. On my work I also disabled all notifications except for the calendar. Even slack message our main tool for communication is not allowed to send notifications. It is almost a productivity hack :P

grvdrm 4mo ago

I agree with your points. That said, my view is now (not novel, or unique) that I am not the customer in so many cases. Any app or platform with the slightest hint of an advertising end-game restructures my usage as the product. The customer is instead the sender (or advertiser). So, I can't expect ideal app behavior and usage based on my intentions because I'm sold (as the product) rather than the other way around. Maybe a cynical view, and there are exceptions, but don't think I'm far off.

hgoel 4mo ago

Might as well use a dumb phone I don't get what you guys are doing to be so bothered by notifications. I get them on my wirst and even then it isn't enough to take away mental bandwidth.

everdrive 4mo ago

Maybe it's for the best. The best practice is to have as few apps as possible. The moment an app is abusive with notifications, you know it's time to drop the app anyhow. A lot of people need that one final push to drop the app, so this could help.

miki123211 4mo ago

The worst are apps that bundle genuinely urgent notifications with maketing brain-manipulation promotional crap. Uber is a notorious example. I do genuinely want Uber notifications for when I use Uber. I do not care about whatever promotion it pushes at me.

grishka 4mo ago

My notification setup is more elaborate (for one, I do keep social media notifications on, but silent) but yeah I agree in general. It frightens me seeing some other people's notification shades where they have 20+ spam notifications from all kinds of things that I wouldn't even consider installing an app for, and they're somehow fine with it.

amelius 4mo ago

> Apps allowed to receive push notifications > Phone, Messages, Whatsapp, Apple Health, [brand] bank. Anyone else annoyed by the fact that you can set up do-no-disturb, with exceptions for certain phone numbers, but it doesn't work for apps like WhatsApp?

scope2093 4mo ago
I remember a while back I also had this issue on iOS (maybe around 2022 or so), though lately seems to be solved and works as one can hope so. When you're making the exceptions, do you explicitly input phone numbers or some other method? I selected contacts from my contacts list and it does the job. This is for iOS in my case. I'm not familiar with Android, so cannot give any input there..
- amelius 4mo ago
  On Android I can "star" certain contacts.

burnte 4mo ago

I totally agree. Right now the apps that can notify me are phone, text, email, what's app, and a few bank apps. You are 100% right about turning it off on everything else. I also stopped doing store loyalty cards about 7 years ago and it's been fantastic. I actually get a lot less junk mail and spam/"legit" marketing emails. I don't have a gob of cards to sort through. Corporations should not speak unless spoken to.

mannanj 4mo ago

"Notifications are like alarms other people set for you" Naval Ravikant said this years ago and it stuck with me. Taking a page from your book, I have 0 notifications. I practice notification 0 and have done it for about a half decade now, and it's absolutely liberating and freeing. I found I needed to remove the apps from my phone Home Screen to feel this, as otherwise even their icon presence when opening my phone triggers dopamine loops. When I need to be pinged, I use boundaries and expectations set with those who could interrupt what I'm doing with something important enough. Those people get to know where I'm at, how to reach me, etc and mostly what I do to help them is set them as contacts so my phone lets their calls through beyond voicemail, and I have physical locations accessible to them + times through the day where I'll check in.

rafterydj 4mo ago

100% agree. The spam problem is, I fear, a symptom of the walled gardens of Google and Apple not being very judiciously maintained. They continue to push the bare minimum of notification controls out for the user, but double deal when they allow e.g. custom app-defined notification lists. Something like this would simply never fly if the Unix philosophy were an actual consideration in their product design.