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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications
sitzkrieg wrote 40 min ago:
apple canât even make a working alarm clock on a smartphone
willk wrote 35 min ago:
Mine works, what are you talking about?
semiinfinitely wrote 57 min ago:
technology should be silent
davidgh wrote 1 hour 39 min 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.
willk wrote 32 min ago:
Apple/Google has effectively made notification worthless because they
allow services to abuse notifications. I wish they respected my
time/attention more.
bbarn wrote 1 hour 0 min 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.
moritzwarhier wrote 2 hours 28 min 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.
nathan_compton wrote 3 hours 9 min 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."
k_plankenhorn wrote 3 hours 26 min 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.
megous wrote 3 hours 44 min 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
thanksobama wrote 5 hours 10 min 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 â 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]
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUdm0QMDM0
URI [2]: https://epic.org/sen-wyden-reveals-government-surveillance-of-...
limaoscarjuliet wrote 5 hours 29 min 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.
AlexandrB wrote 5 hours 37 min 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.
annagio_ wrote 7 hours 8 min 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.
autoexec wrote 7 hours 12 min ago:
What I'm doing: leaving them all off
avazhi wrote 7 hours 32 min 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.
mcdonje wrote 7 hours 35 min 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 wrote 5 hours 14 min 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 wrote 5 hours 4 min 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 wrote 3 hours 52 min ago:
Not sure i understand. Sure it doesnât require it but Apple
doesnât trust you to handle it because youâll 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.
hennell wrote 10 hours 56 min 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.
lionkor wrote 11 hours 5 min 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 wrote 5 hours 5 min 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.
lorenzleutgeb wrote 11 hours 43 min 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...
simulator5g wrote 11 hours 46 min 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:
URI [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/10/fbi-pulled-...
karlgkk wrote 11 hours 57 min 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!"
newtwentysix wrote 13 hours 9 min 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.
bandrami wrote 13 hours 59 min ago:
Also can the browsers finally acknowledge that allowing websites to
request the ability to send desktop notifications was a terrible
mistake?
jacobajit wrote 14 hours 28 min 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 wrote 14 hours 13 min ago:
Because Apple makes iOS, they could have a much more rigorous
solution, like Googleâs.
A nondeterministic, energy hungry classifier is inferior to writing a
policy to define channels.
jacobajit wrote 14 hours 10 min 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.
shevy-java wrote 14 hours 51 min 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.
bofaGuy wrote 15 hours 23 min ago:
I feel like the CAN-SPAM Act should apply to push notifications as
well. I donât know of any case that has tested this.
passive wrote 15 hours 38 min 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.
dminor wrote 15 hours 40 min 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 wrote 12 hours 32 min ago:
SMS will go exactly the same direction as push as far as being
intermediated.
LoganDark wrote 16 hours 30 min 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 wrote 15 hours 12 min 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.
netik wrote 16 hours 39 min 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.
DrBenCarson wrote 16 hours 47 min ago:
Vast majority of software should not be able to send a push
notification. Send an email if you need to alert me.
0x59 wrote 16 hours 49 min 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
dualvariable wrote 17 hours 4 min ago:
let me pour one out for all my homies in the marketing department...
elzbardico wrote 17 hours 12 min 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.
drnick1 wrote 17 hours 15 min 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 wrote 15 hours 28 min 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.
wps wrote 18 hours 16 min 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.
_HMCB_ wrote 18 hours 26 min ago:
Am I supposed to feel sorry for developers? How did this make it to
page one?
extraduder_ire wrote 16 hours 46 min ago:
Seeing how they think about these things can be interesting.
QuadmasterXLII wrote 18 hours 28 min 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 donât know which of
these steps are loadbearing, but my phone has gotten much quieter.
inventor7777 wrote 18 hours 38 min 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
URI [1]: https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notific...
gumby271 wrote 15 hours 24 min 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 wrote 3 hours 17 min 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 :)
tonymet wrote 18 hours 57 min 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 wrote 12 hours 30 min ago:
Whatâs fun is all that âinterveningâ infrastructure theyâve
introduced also doubles up as a big surveillance network.
dmitrygr wrote 18 hours 57 min ago:
> 2 to 5 notifications per week is the optimal range for most apps and
exceeding it materially increases uninstalls;
Wow. Yâall must be much more tolerant of your time being wasted than
i am. One notification from an app I didnât 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)
dools wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
â 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 amplifiedâ
So ⦠mission accomplished then? This is pretty much how I would like
it to operate.
eks391 wrote 3 hours 8 min 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.
preciousoo wrote 19 hours 34 min 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
wanderingmind wrote 19 hours 43 min 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
baby wrote 20 hours 15 min 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. Doesnât make sense.
Laurel1234 wrote 19 hours 37 min ago:
This only works if the app properly tags notification categories, no?
aidenn0 wrote 19 hours 21 min 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.
nielsbot wrote 20 hours 7 min ago:
You can long press on the notification (or swipe left?) and pick
"Turn Off..." among other options
URI [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108781#manage-alerts
baby wrote 15 hours 54 min ago:
turn off is the only option basically, try an android phone bro
androidinlimbo wrote 20 hours 29 min ago:
That's why my next phone will neither be Android or iPhone.
felooboolooomba wrote 20 hours 30 min ago:
This article separately needs a summary at top.
iamacyborg wrote 12 hours 34 min ago:
Not everything needs to be summarised
cadamsdotcom wrote 20 hours 33 min ago:
Iâm 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 âunsubscribeâ
out of the inbox into its own tagged area. Every few days, I go in and
unsubscribe to everything thatâs 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 thereâs a
discount. Because if thereâs no discount - they get no details.
Itâs a simple exchange; offer to pay a fair price for my details and
Iâll consider it. But so far my time and details are worth more than
any retailer has offered to pay.
kilroy123 wrote 6 hours 38 min ago:
I made a more advanced version of the unsubscribe thing to kill all
unnecessary notifications from email. I made it open-sourced:
URI [1]: https://unfuck.email
makeitdouble wrote 16 hours 7 min ago:
> passive
I get your point and see it as valid, yet to nitpick most people
don't feel they have a choice.
Not answering the phone or replying to people's messages is a no-no
to many, which sets them in an arms race against spammers and social
apps trying to get them from all fronts. And they get frustrated by
us living in no-disturb land 24/7.
I don't know it could be solved, but I feel for them.
cadamsdotcom wrote 15 hours 9 min ago:
For sure - some folks have to unwind expectations theyâve let
themselves be under around responsiveness to messages.
Feels like an education issue rather than a tech issue.. thoughts?
bix6 wrote 14 hours 54 min ago:
I think itâs cultural. Someone sends you a message and knows
you likely also have your phone on you. If you donât respond
they might feel ignored.
It can be hard to set phone boundaries with work. There are
certain people who get very upset if I donât answer their phone
call.
al_borland wrote 19 hours 59 min ago:
With the retailer asking for a phone number, I donât 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.
epicide wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
That's precisely why I don't ever accept the bribe. If I don't like
the non-discounted price, then I don't buy it. Now they neither get
the data nor the sale.
What's frustrating is that a lot of grocery stores do this. If you
sell something absolutely necessary, such as basic foods, you
should not be allowed to do the whole "mark it up to mark it down"
strategy.
Also, a tip for most grocery stores (at least in the US): enter in
any area code plus 867-5309. Chances are high that somebody has
registered it. It's better than sharing with a family member
because so many people are using it, the data becomes less useful.
Alternatively, ask the clerk to "use the store card". Usually, they
will oblige.
cadamsdotcom wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
Yes - and a fair price would incorporate that.
Hence I doubt retailers will ever consider offering a fair price.
criddell wrote 19 hours 40 min 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.
Itâs probably time to do something similar for email. Not in my
address book? Straight to trash.
al_borland wrote 18 hours 47 min ago:
Adding a filter is still extra work for me. Saying ânoâ stops
the need for the rule and is less work than giving the info in
the first place.
My phone is setup similarly. I did it manually back in the day,
then sent some feedback to Apple, which they added in the next
update about a year later. Iâve submitted a lot of feature
requests, this was the only one they actually did, which is a
great one. It made things much easier. Though they seemed to have
changed the settings of how this works with the call screening
feature. I used to have a shortcut to toggle this off and on,
when I was expecting a call from an unknown number. I need to
revisit my setup here, as the shortcut doesnât actually do
anything anymore.
Doing this to email is an interesting idea. If sitting in one
ecosystem, maybe it would work. Iâm fractured, so itâs a
non-starter. Even beyond that, I think it would be an issue as
there are real emails I do want to get which Iâd never add to
my address book, as Iâd never send an email to the address. I
think Iâd want a whitelist for these addresses, that imported
the emails from my address book as a base.
At work I had a rule like this for many year. Anything internal
would pass, plus a few external domains I named. Everything else
would go to a spam folder for vendor emails. Keeping up on this
was hard. I ended up throwing in the towel a couple years ago
after running the rule for 5-10 years. This blog post is what
made me move away from this rule[0].
[0]
URI [1]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/digital-hygiene-emails/
SpaceNugget wrote 12 hours 19 min ago:
I'm sorry to burst your bubble but I don't think your feature
request had anything to do with when apple implemented call
allow listing. It's been a thing forever and they were surly
aware of it since the iPhone first came out
pugio wrote 20 hours 31 min ago:
That unsubscribe rule is genius. (Obvious in hindsight, as the best
things are.) Thanks for that.
cuuupid wrote 19 hours 2 min ago:
if you're in Gmail this filter works really well for me:
("list-unsubscribe" OR "unsubscribe" OR "list-id")
iamacyborg wrote 12 hours 39 min ago:
If youâre in gmail thereâs literally already an interface to
easily unsubscribe from stuff, itâs under âManage
subscriptionsâ. Yahoo similarly have a âsubscriptions hubâ
efitz wrote 20 hours 33 min ago:
Marketing and advertising people ruin everything they touch.
ProllyInfamous wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
>"But salesmen exist because customers don't actually know what they
want"
"I want item ABC rev D with options X, Y, & Z â 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?!
iamacyborg wrote 19 hours 58 min ago:
Donât forget the engineers and product folks who build these
systems.
nathanmills wrote 21 hours 20 min ago:
[flagged]
tomhow wrote 20 hours 18 min ago:
We've banned this account.
We detached this comment from [1] and marked it off topic.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48301060
plasticeagle wrote 22 hours 25 min 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 wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
Itâs 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. [1] The next post will be highlighting
the difference between the actual state of the art techniques being
deployed by large tech coâs (LinkedIn and Pinterest, for example)
vs whatâs available via commercial marketing providers and how most
marketers donât 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.
URI [1]: https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/what-google-yahoo-...
npunt wrote 16 hours 3 min 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.
iamacyborg wrote 10 hours 36 min ago:
Yeah, that's true about the allow, and for sure marketing and
product teams are deploying misleading consent priming which
doesn't fully explain to the user what they're actually allowing
in the first place, or setting baselines that are too permissive
vs what the user is expecting.
> 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
I don't disagree necessarily, but I see it as them putting
themselves in a position to act as a toll collector, which has
already happened with email and web search and is only getting
worse with the introduction of LLM's into both of those things.
It's a bummer this article ended up doing much better than my
email one, as I think that might better position the problem in a
lot of user's minds and highlight just how much surveillance is
sitting on top of those free inboxes.
orf wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
> Google followed in 2010 with Cloud to Device Messaging, then Google
Cloud Messaging in 2012, then Firebase Cloud Messaging in 2016
Classic
pimlottc wrote 17 hours 8 min ago:
Iâm curious if anything meaningful changed along with these name
changes or itâs mostly issues of branding/implementation.
lanerobertlane wrote 22 hours 46 min 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.
rafterydj wrote 1 hour 3 min 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.
mannanj wrote 1 hour 30 min 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.
burnte wrote 4 hours 18 min 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.
amelius wrote 5 hours 22 min 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 wrote 4 hours 39 min 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 wrote 4 hours 37 min ago:
On Android I can "star" certain contacts.
grishka wrote 5 hours 33 min 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.
miki123211 wrote 5 hours 59 min 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.
everdrive wrote 6 hours 12 min 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.
hgoel wrote 6 hours 20 min 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.
grvdrm wrote 7 hours 1 min 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.
peterspath wrote 7 hours 41 min 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
DanielHB wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
I disable all group chat notifications too, only direct messages
trigger notifications for me.
gus_massa wrote 8 hours 35 min 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.
pjmlp wrote 9 hours 44 min ago:
Fully agree, the apps are to blame for misusing notifications for
marketing and ads, they are the ones doing this to themselves.
ivanjermakov wrote 9 hours 47 min ago:
I also allow emails, but I'm very agressive at filtering
promotion/junk emails with skip inbox rules:
URI [1]: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en
nicman23 wrote 11 hours 27 min ago:
if a app messages me it is uninstalled. we have too many installed
apps anyways.
8fingerlouie wrote 11 hours 31 min 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.
nottorp wrote 11 hours 41 min 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 wrote 4 hours 46 min ago:
You can mute group chats in whatsapp.
mikaeluman wrote 11 hours 47 min ago:
Spot on.
bambax wrote 12 hours 12 min 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.
pndy wrote 12 hours 57 min 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.
derefr wrote 13 hours 49 min 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 wrote 5 hours 18 min 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 wrote 4 hours 25 min 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.
quality_life wrote 14 hours 44 min 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.
Helmut10001 wrote 16 hours 13 min ago:
I have my phone always in Do Not Disturb. That's it.
bruce511 wrote 16 hours 13 min 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".
xnx wrote 17 hours 6 min ago:
Attention(/time) is our most valuable resource. Protect it
ruthlessly.
Gigachad wrote 18 hours 12 min 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.
Grimblewald wrote 18 hours 22 min 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.
svachalek wrote 18 hours 47 min 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.
OptionOfT wrote 19 hours 21 min 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.
hedora wrote 19 hours 51 min 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.
intrasight wrote 19 hours 59 min ago:
Phone, Calendar, Health - that's it for me
kevstev wrote 20 hours 16 min 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.
pseudosavant wrote 20 hours 20 min 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.
hn_throwaway_99 wrote 20 hours 42 min 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.
int0x29 wrote 1 hour 10 min ago:
Worse it's from a marketing perspective if you read the guys bio.
account42 wrote 10 hours 5 min ago:
This is all a consequence from running software that doesn't
respect you and notification are just one of many symptoms.
I'd rather choose better software than let Google/Apple decide what
software running on my device is allowed to do.
subscribed wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
Usually you don't have any choice of the software if you need to
use a particular product or service.
miki123211 wrote 5 hours 49 min ago:
Yeah, the worst kind of software is the kind that interacts
with the real world, particularly when chosen by clueless
people at non-tech, real-world companies.
Conferences are great examples. You do want to submit your
paper and go to a conference. To do that, they need your email
address(understandable). That email ends up on dozens of email
lists run by people who are doing "outreach" or something of
the sort.
autoexec wrote 7 hours 8 min ago:
You can usually choose to "need" to use a particular product or
service though. It's not always worth it, but there's a choice.
spwa4 wrote 10 hours 1 min ago:
You mean it's a consequence of very large amounts of people
refusing to pay for software, at essentially any other cost ...
Of course you could describe almost all of the internet that way.
AnthonyMouse wrote 8 hours 40 min ago:
It's a consequence of having platforms instead of protocols.
Suppose you want delivery notifications for your packages. The
seller, by contrast, wants to spam you with marketing.
If getting the notifications requires you to install their app,
they're going to shovel any spam into it that they can, and
then they're writing the code that runs on your device. Whereas
if the software on your device is controlled by you and the
notifications are received using a standard protocol, you (or
someone like uBlock) can create filters to only show the
notifications you actually want and discard the spam.
But for that to actually work you need the software running on
the client to be under the control of the user independent of
which device or service they're using, and subject to
competitive pressure. Otherwise the platform uses is as a means
for lock-in and then filters your notifications in the ways
that benefit them rather than you, or just does a lazy job
because they know you've been deprived of having a lot of other
alternatives.
miki123211 wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
Unless the task is extremely well defined, protocols don't
really work.
Imagine you're a shipping company and lock yourself into a
parcel tracking protocol. You then decide to offer the
innovative feature of parcel lockers, which need a code (or
an action on your device) to open. How are you going to make
the thousands of weird homebrew clients that people are using
on their jailbroken Nintendo Switches or whatever to behave?
spwa4 wrote 5 hours 54 min ago:
> But for that to actually work you need the software running
on the client to be under the control of the user independent
of which device or service ...
In other words, you need the user of the software to pay for
it's development. Since that won't happen ...
account42 wrote 3 hours 47 min ago:
That isn't the only way.
account42 wrote 9 hours 38 min ago:
I don't pay for most of my software and yet it still respects
me. Of course it also isn't made by large corporations with
marketing and sales departments.
spwa4 wrote 5 hours 55 min ago:
The vast majority of spammers aren't large corporations but
really small ones. Scammy ones. At least judging by my spam
folder.
graemep wrote 10 hours 42 min ago:
> 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.
Align better for now. It will get enshittified.
I try very hard to avoid installing apps specific to a particular
business or organisation. So far I have only had to install a
government app and some from banks. Even those are avoidable (but
it would be very inconvenient to do so).
0cf8612b2e1e wrote 19 hours 44 min ago:
I recently had to setup Microsoft Authenticator. It refused to
register a code unless I enabled notifications.
You are a two factor app. I should never be in a situation where
there is an unexpected login I need to verify.
WorldMaker wrote 46 min ago:
I believe this is also a consequence of iOS gating background
processing and scheduled timers allowed by an app based on
whether or not notifications are enabled by the user. I believe
Microsoft Authenticator also wants notifications enabled for the
same reason most Banking apps on iOS want notifications enabled,
so that it can register a ~10-minute background timer to run any
backups, securely clear program memory, and safely "logout" from
any active "session".
On the one hand it helps avoid "permissions fatigue" that the
user just has the one permission to manage ("enable
notifications"), but on the other hand it does lead to these
questions about why an entire class of applications (banking apps
and security apps) whose role should be mostly never to send
notifications (because that can be a FUD/fear/fraud vector) need
notifications enabled to work securely.
wazoox wrote 4 hours 23 min ago:
AFAICT any TOTP app (FreeOTP+, Aegis...) works just fine with
Microsoft services (or Google, etc). You don't actually need to
install several TOTP apps.
0cf8612b2e1e wrote 4 hours 11 min ago:
Microsoft Authenticator is not standard TOTP, but their own
private flavor.
wazoox wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
I've used FreeOTP+ to connect to my customers' Microsoft
Teams for years without any trouble.
dwedge wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
I want scopes like Graphene has for storage scopes. I want this
on my phone and browser - let the site/app think it has
everything (cookies, storage, microphone, camera, notifications,
whatever it wants) but it's all empty and does nothing.
1718627440 wrote 10 hours 34 min ago:
Apps can know whether you granted permission?? That sounds like
a security flaw.
noirscape wrote 4 hours 32 min ago:
They can, but there's an OS option that basically is "I'm going
to say yes, but then effectively do no". Basically it'll
pretend to the application that a permission is granted, but
then just keep returning empty information or doing nothing
with it. So notification perms would then be seen as enabled,
but nothing is actually being send to the user.
Unfortunately Google isn't really exposing this to users, so
you need something like App Ops or adb to set it up.
miki123211 wrote 5 hours 55 min ago:
This is basically required for clueless (and even not so
clueless) users.
If there's a chat app I installed 3 years ago, with no
intention of giving it camera access, and I suddenly need to
use that app for a video call, I don't want to be stuck
debugging broken camera issues for two hours. I'd much rather
have the app tell me that it doesn't have camera access.
xmprt wrote 16 min ago:
This is fair for permissions. But for notifications, the app
shouldn't need to know. It can just send them into the void
for all the app cares. If the notification doesn't work then
it should never break critical app functionality and apps
should be built with the assumption that users will never
see/interact with notifications.
Ntrails wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
> This is basically required for clueless (and even not so
clueless) users.
I can actually confess that this hit me. Almost nothing on
my phone has permission to use my camera, including my web
browser (why???). I assume this was done in a fit of pique
upon discovering that the setting even existed.
Roll on (god knows how many years later) and I cannot get
into the gym with the link I was emailed to have my browser
read a QR because my browser is just a grey screen. It was
only when the member of staff suggested permissions that I
realised what was going on.
I'm the problem, it's me
1718627440 wrote 5 hours 18 min ago:
The OS could tell you instead. If it is a camera app, the OS
could tell you on install, that you can't start the app
without given camera access, because that's what the app is.
autoexec wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
Of course, that way they can so they can refuse to work until
you uninstall or give in to their demands. There are other
operating systems that present fake data at least.
subscribed wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
Yep. Just today I had a tram/bus ticket purchase app refuse to
work unless I grant it Phone access.
implements wrote 12 hours 10 min ago:
Tip: The iPhone Passwords App has basic TOTP functionality
(manually create a password entry and click âSet Up Codeâ). I
have a few dummy passwords which are effectively just labels for
some login codes - itâs one less App to install.
robbiep wrote 7 hours 52 min ago:
Some Microsoft setups ONLY allow Authenticator - canât use
1pass etc. I have recently fallen into this pit
account42 wrote 10 hours 2 min ago:
Unfortunately Microsoft Authenticator does more than TOTP and
usually its not up to the user to decide which two factor
implementation is accepted.
ishtanbul wrote 15 hours 9 min ago:
Okta has push as an option. Maybe msft has that too.
onion2k wrote 11 hours 55 min ago:
Key word there being 'option'. If you choose to use push as
your mechanism then enabling it is obvious. If you choose not
to the app should still work. You don't need push notifications
enabled on an MFA app.
_carbyau_ wrote 19 hours 2 min ago:
> I should never be in a situation where there is an unexpected
login I need to verify.
Isn't that kind of the point? If someone else is trying to login
somewhere with your credentials, your two factor will ping up?
zem wrote 10 hours 52 min ago:
huh, is that why my google authenticator app pops up randomly?
i always figured it was a bug in the app or in android.
tardedmeme wrote 11 hours 13 min ago:
I saw a new marketing strategy recently: Someone tried to sign
into something with my email. I didn't have an account, so they
took the excuse to send me an email asking me to create an
account.
reaperducer wrote 6 hours 45 min ago:
I saw a new marketing strategy recently: Someone tried to
sign into something with my email. I didn't have an account,
so they took the excuse to send me an email asking me to
create an account.
This has been going on since at least 2006.
Startups will "growth hack" by buying e-mail lists and
feeding them into their password recovery tools.
A certain percentage of people will then follow the links and
end up creating a new account on a service they had no
interest in that now has their confirmed contact information,
a new user, and a plausible reason to bombard them with
marketing email.
miki123211 wrote 5 hours 51 min ago:
I recently started getting emails from a company warning me
that "I only had x days left to verify your account."
The account was supposedly registered for an organization
whose name was somewhat similar to mine, so I thought
somebody fat-fingered their coworker's email (the initial
email was an invitation to create an account and join the
org), but it might have very well been the tactic you
described.
0cf8612b2e1e wrote 18 hours 55 min ago:
Why would I want that? If it is not me, I am not going to allow
the login. Making it a notification makes it more likely I
could fat finger an approval.
I guess you can make the argument that you are then made aware
of login attempts, but that feels more like something the host
service should control.
_carbyau_ wrote 18 hours 30 min ago:
> Why would I want that?
Because to get that far they entered your password? Which you
might like to change?
You did mention: "You are a two factor app."
If they've got past your first factor, you might want to
know.
Tagbert wrote 13 hours 6 min ago:
Our Okta is setup so that it usually does the two-factor
before asking for password.
hunter2_ wrote 17 hours 20 min ago:
I recently got an unsolicited OTP email from Microsoft,
which led me to fear that someone had entered my password,
but no: I eventually was able to confirm that the arrival
of an OTP does not, in fact, require that someone enter
anything beyond my email address. This is rather insane (I
should not be having a blood pressure event due to
Microsoft) but on the other hand I do understand the
passwordless concept which is just a password-reset flow
sans password-change. Perhaps a nice middle ground would be
if the OTP email explicitly stated that my password was not
entered.
projektfu wrote 6 hours 4 min ago:
Some providers (looking at you, Intuit) don't seem to
understand TWO factor authentication and will allow
someone to bypass your password if they can intercept the
SMS or email, and treat it as a normal login.
xocnad wrote 8 hours 7 min ago:
This also happened to me about a week ago and I had the
same reaction/discovery process you did. OT but I wonder
if there was a recent ramp up in these attacks. It was
done against an email I do not regularly use that was
attached to my account as an alternate and haveibeenpwned
confirmed was in a data breach back in 2020.
dexterdog wrote 17 hours 24 min ago:
I would, but I don't need to know immediately. Plus you
have the other vector of my phone sitting on a table and
showing the notification to a person who can see it when
they are trying to login as me.
hunter2_ wrote 17 hours 15 min ago:
I find it to be a poor default that sensitive data is
shown on the lock screen. I change that setting as a
first order of business whenever I'm setting up a new
phone.
tambeb wrote 19 hours 52 min ago:
Notification categories are like mailing lists now. You may have
unsubscribed from the daily deals email but you're still going to
be auto subscribed to every new slightly modified category in
perpetuity. Unless you fully disable notifications for an app (in
Android at least, in my experience), new enabled by default
notification categories are added all the time.
nottorp wrote 11 hours 40 min ago:
iOS asks you if you want to allow notifications when each new app
is started. You can just say no there and you're done.
It would be better if they were totally opt-in of course (1), but
that's not bloody likely to happen.
(1) As in off by default with no questions.
WorldMaker wrote 37 min ago:
On iOS Scheduled Summaries are really great. That's become my
personal default on my phone. Scheduled Summaries roughly every
4 hours during waking hours and the default choice every time
the question pops up for a new app is "In Scheduled Summary". I
could see with some modest UX improvements Scheduled Summaries
becoming the default for more people.
Heavy use of Scheduled Summaries does also lead to me wondering
why there isn't a "default notifications to Ask/On/Scheduled
Summaries/Off" global setting, though I would want that choice
between Scheduled and Off at least.
illiac786 wrote 11 hours 12 min ago:
I can see a certain category of people screaming that WhatsApp
calls are broken if that were to pass⦠but I do agree that no
one would scream louder than app makers wanting to retain their
share of human brain attention.
nottorp wrote 10 hours 45 min ago:
As far as i know my Whatsapp is muted and the mute is muted
again. But it still rings for voice calls.
It's integrated somehow with the phone app on iOS, whatsapp
calls show alongside GSM calls.
leonidasv wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
When they exist at all. Many apps that provide important
notifications (like delivery tracking, drop-off time etc) put
them under the same category as marketing stuff. You can't have
just the transactional tracking, you have to opt-in for the
marketing notifications as well.
samuelec wrote 5 hours 20 min ago:
I had to disable from Android settings all LinkedIn
notifications.
I check it from time to time but I haven't missed anything,
nowadays LinkedIn is mostly garbage
alexlesuper wrote 6 hours 10 min ago:
The ridesharing apps are the most annoying about this. Yes I
want to be notified when my uber driver is almost here to pick
me up. No, I don't want a notification about yet another sale.
vkou wrote 3 hours 22 min ago:
Have you looked at the Uber app recently? 90% of it is
promotionshit.
I am just looking for a fucking taxi.
Are there any VCs looking to give away a few billion dollars
to disrupt the ossified, wasteful, poor customer experience
taxi app market?
iamacyborg wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
> Are there any VCs looking to give away a few billion
dollars to disrupt the ossified, wasteful, poor customer
experience taxi app market?
Waymo are rolling out, slowly. No one'll be in a real
position to compete against them.
wavemode wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
It baffles me that they do this. I have to disable push
notifications from Lyft entirely, so instead they send me
ride updates as text messages, which surely must cost them
way more money. Why not just introduce a "ride updates only"
push notification category and stop this madness?
monkpit wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
It needs to be enforced by the OS or by law. Like how you
get transactional emails without getting marketing spam. I
want the same for notifications.
inetknght wrote 51 min ago:
> It needs to be enforced by the OS or by law. Like how
you get transactional emails without getting marketing
spam.
What glorious universe do you live in where email is
respected enough to have transactions separate from
marketing, and that this is not only required by law but
also enforced?
monkpit wrote 20 min ago:
Not sure about your experience, Iâve almost never
encountered a marketing email that didnât have an
unsubscribe link, as is mandated by law in some
countries. So Iâm not really sure what youâre
talking about.
In the past, yeah. But today? Never.
abhinavk wrote 14 hours 46 min ago:
On iOS atleast, Live Activities are separate from
Notifications. So I can still monitor food or grocery delivery
even though I have turned off their notifications.
Now a few apps have started sending notifications through
WhatsApp because they have my phone number. e.g. Amazon
reaperducer wrote 6 hours 50 min ago:
On iOS atleast, Live Activities are separate from
Notifications.
Should be, but not always. There are plenty of apps that
still mix marketing and functional notification.
Hell, even Apple does this, especially on new devices.
[Settings]: Log in to your iCloud account to sync data.
Three minutes laterâ¦
[Settings]: You qualify for three free months of Apple Music!
post-it wrote 4 hours 37 min ago:
Tbf both of those are promotional. If I'm not logged into
iCloud, it's for a reason.
tambeb wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
I'm not worried about missing food notifications because they
send me an email and a text (... and a fax and a hardcopy
confirmation letter in the mail.)
leonidasv wrote 14 hours 41 min ago:
Yeah, but I still see apps that don't implement those
features. Mostly React Native/Flutter apps that don't bother
implementing native features. On Android it's even more
depressing.
jmbwell wrote 16 hours 15 min ago:
Thereâs the other direction too. You only get a couple toggles,
and something you actually need is behind both, so you canât
not get all notifications
tambeb wrote 16 hours 6 min ago:
Another sneaky behavior in Android is that categories that have
yet to send a notification, which of course includes newly
added auto-enabled channels, are collapsed under the 'show
unused categories' button.
iamalizard wrote 20 hours 5 min 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.
Arainach wrote 18 hours 12 min 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.
nickburns wrote 18 hours 44 min 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.
dylan604 wrote 21 hours 27 min 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
jillesvangurp wrote 21 hours 29 min 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.
asdff wrote 21 hours 10 min 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.
iamacyborg wrote 21 hours 16 min 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.
Thereâs 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.
URI [1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2740908.2741694
itopaloglu83 wrote 21 hours 40 min ago:
I would say the same applies to background processing as well. A
random app that I donât interact with launching every minute and
wasting everything from battery to network bandwidth is simply not
acceptable, and most of the time theyâre loading adds or doing some
other stuff that serves me no good.
donmcronald wrote 18 hours 34 min 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.
latexr wrote 22 hours 26 min ago:
To your list, I would add a calendar and reminders app.
pants2 wrote 22 hours 28 min 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.
ivanjermakov wrote 9 hours 45 min ago:
It's a failure of iOS architecture to not force applications to tag
each notification with labels. App developers have to build
notification management themselves for fine grained control.
Android has notification channels, but I'm not sure how widely it's
used:
URI [1]: https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/compose/notificat...
pjmlp wrote 9 hours 42 min ago:
This is the kind of thing where we actually would like to have
store policy enforce correct use of APIs.
edoceo wrote 16 hours 23 min ago:
WellsFargo does that. Important notification and advert-BS on the
same channel. If you block their notifications you don't get the
near-real-time Zelle alert. Enabled you get what you want and also
YOU MIGHT BE PRE-APPROVED!
array_key_first wrote 18 hours 49 min ago:
On Android with notification categories it is, but iOS doesn't have
that. Also, I think it's mostly a trust system. But Uber in
particular does actually do it right, and you can just turn off
promotional notifications.
apothegm wrote 19 hours 11 min ago:
This. So much this.
verelo wrote 20 hours 45 min ago:
Yep exactly this. The app developers are the problem, but Apple and
Google are not helping here.
nurumaik wrote 20 hours 51 min ago:
Apple should add "promotional notifications" section to iOS, then
ban everyone who don't put their marketing bs into that category
closetohome wrote 1 hour 15 min ago:
There was actually an app store rule for the first couple of
years after notifications became available, basically saying
don't use it for promotions. A few apps actually got pulled for
sending spammy notifications.
But then everyone started doing it and Apple stopped enforcing
the rule. It may still be in there somewhere as a "guideline."
havaloc wrote 17 hours 13 min ago:
Yes! iOS 27 needs to categorize notifications using AI. Apps
aren't supposed to advertise to you, but some don't allow for
that distinction. I want notifications on for when my sandwich is
arriving, but I don't want push notifications for a promotion.
Some apps are good about this, others don't allow that
granularity. I hate the all or nothing.
On the flipside, I have an app that sends notifications. We don't
abuse it or use it for promotions, and APNS and Google's version
works perfectly fine for us.
LtWorf wrote 20 hours 49 min ago:
Apple isn't your friend though.
edit: downvote all you want. Fact remains that there is no way
currently to block advertisement notifications and no
disincentives for those who use them.
sroussey wrote 17 hours 42 min ago:
Send everything to the iOS notification summary which you then
donât look at. Uber and others can send time sensitive
notifications and those donât go in the summary. Itâs
basically a junk notification folder.
Works well.
pcl wrote 21 hours 45 min ago:
For me, it's quite straightforward. If an app makes an unsolicited
spammy push, it's notifications-off. No exceptions.
conductr wrote 10 hours 31 min ago:
I just refuse to grant permission as my default. If I ever feel
like Iâm missing out, I can turn it on later. Usually I donât
and if I do I quickly regret it.
tiew9Vii wrote 14 hours 51 min ago:
Agreed, thereâs a level of trust and as soon as the app breaks
that trust with spam, notifications get turned off for that app.
Gigachad wrote 18 hours 10 min ago:
Has been like this on my phone for a while. It's crazy when you
see someone who hasn't blocked everything and their phone dings
multiple times a minute.
Esophagus4 wrote 20 hours 43 min ago:
Yes. Iâd rather live with the temporary inconvenience of
needing to open the Uber app to check the status of my ride once
a month than wade through notification spam on an intermittent
basis forever.
dylan604 wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
Snapchat has to be the all time worst offender to me about
abusive level of notifications. Luckily, you can turn them off,
but holy cow batman, that's a lot of notification options to deal
with.
al_borland wrote 20 hours 6 min ago:
For me the worst is NextDoor. I donât have the app installed,
but they also have email notifications. There are seemingly 100
options and I turned them all off when I first made the
account. Periodically they add new ones and auto-enable them
for everyone. There is not universal way to shut them off,
short of blocking them all together or deleting my account. The
account was such a pain to setup that Iâm hesitant to delete
it, for the 1 time every couple years where itâs useful.
bpicolo wrote 4 hours 55 min ago:
Yep, I straight up deleted my Nextdoor. Nextdoor itself is
spammy and ad ridden. And most of the content in the
community is also just spam anyway.
My neighborhood has a WhatsApp. I engage with it if I feel
like it. Works great
grantith wrote 15 hours 40 min ago:
I flagged them as spam the other day.
slater wrote 20 hours 3 min ago:
Even worse with ND e-mails are how they've absolutely
perfected the cut-off character limit for what's being posted
in your area. So my inbox is just perma-barraged with
click-bait-y "This place on Smith Street has the best...",
"Health officials are investigating an outbreak of...", etc.
brk wrote 17 hours 28 min ago:
That is why I just filter ND emails to spam. Those patterns
just reaffirm I donât want the kind of content they
offer.
iamacyborg wrote 21 hours 21 min ago:
Remember when Android used to let notification senders hijack
turning your screen on, Snapchat used that one a lot.
maest wrote 20 hours 7 min ago:
That's "growth hacking" for you
losvedir wrote 21 hours 54 min ago:
Tell me use iOS without telling me you do. Android has separate
notification channel toggles, so I've turned off the marketing
ones. I was shocked and aghast when I spent a year trying to use an
iPhone that it didn't do this. Part of the reason I went back to my
trusty Pixels.
MiddleEndian wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
I use Android. Lyft put marketing notifications in the default
notification channel on my device. If the Play Store were useful,
they'd have banned Lyft until they fixed it. (haven't gotten one
in a bit so maybe they did (or maybe I set something so that the
app could only message me while it's active))
TingPing wrote 21 hours 50 min ago:
While iOS doesnât do this at the OS level Iâve never seen an
app that didnât have these options. I assumed itâs required
by Apple.
vhcr wrote 20 hours 13 min ago:
They technically allow you to, but make it really annoying to.
Uber for example:
Account > Settings > Accessibility > Communication Settings
crote wrote 20 hours 13 min ago:
Most apps are cross-platform. If you're already required to do
it on Android, going out of your way to avoid it on iOS doesn't
make a lot of sense.
Arainach wrote 18 hours 10 min ago:
It absolutely makes sense (in a capitalist sense). Then you
get more money/engagement/whatever on all of the other
platforms.
It's the same reason Microsoft built functionality to let
users in Europe have links open in their default browser
instead of Edge but blocked that feature for the rest of the
world.
greyface- wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
Lots of iOS apps have the option, but ignore it and send you
push ads anyway. Apple may require it to be present during app
review, but they don't seem to enforce that it's used
correctly.
bigiain wrote 20 hours 11 min ago:
Does Google actively police app's use of channels? Is there
any mechanism to stop apps abusing "time critical" channels
and sending unwanted marketing?
ASalazarMX wrote 21 hours 56 min ago:
Some banks also do this, and offer no way to segregate marketing
from utilitarian push notifications. This is borderline abuse of
trust IMO.
rkagerer wrote 21 hours 6 min ago:
It's not borderline, it's absolutely crossed the line.
unglaublich wrote 21 hours 57 min ago:
No one willingly says "yes" to advertisements, but people will say
"yes" to important-updates(-and-advertisements).
iamacyborg wrote 21 hours 20 min ago:
Hundreds of thousands of people declaratively opt into receiving
marketing with informed consent on a daily basis. Just because
you donât does not mean other people are like you.
ninkendo wrote 17 hours 23 min ago:
Is âinformed consentâ that little checkbox that is checked
by default? Or is it the one with the wording that says
something about âdiscounts and offersâ? Or is it the one
thatâs enabled because itâs a ânew categoryâ that
didnât exist when the user signed up so why not require them
to opt out? Oh, I know, maybe youâre talking about the
âenable notifications? Yes/Ask Me Laterâ dialog that is
pushed on them every single time they open the app.
Iâm sorry but if you honestly think the number of users who
receive marketing spam have expressed âinformed consentâ
youâre fucking high. There is a multi-trillion dollar
industry devoted to tricking people into opting into spam. Stop
pretending these people are expressing any consent at all.
iamacyborg wrote 12 hours 48 min ago:
I live in the UK where we actually have sane regulations
around this stuff, I realise laws are different and folks in
the US in particular donât have much protection from spam.
Esophagus4 wrote 20 hours 41 min ago:
Yes⦠seeing my wifeâs email inbox is mind blowing.
Maybe she didnât opt in, but she will never unsubscribe from
anything.
Emails from every site sheâs ever shopped at.
array_key_first wrote 18 hours 45 min ago:
I mean, it's kind of an insurmountable obstacle. Why bother
trying to unsubscribe when you're always gonna get spam
anyway? It's just gonna come back.
Also, websites are shady. If you put in a required email,
they'll usually automatically check a little box for you that
says "allow us to ruin your inbox?" How helpful of them.
And, I'm not even convinced that checkbox does anything.
account42 wrote 9 hours 50 min ago:
"Report as spam and block sender"
Repeat until the emails stop.
iamacyborg wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
I realise that CANSPAM as a law in the US is titled
appropriately but I live in the UK where declarative opt-in
is a must apart from a couple âsoftâ opt-in scenarios.
People. Opt. In.
Stop conflating your preferences with other peopleâs.
brandonwindson wrote 11 hours 53 min ago:
Spammers ignore both opt-in and opt-out, they do not care
about UK or US law. That is where hosting provider
enforcement matters.
iamacyborg wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
Agreed but I donât find the framing of labelling
marketers as spammers particularly accurate or useful.
antiframe wrote 16 hours 24 min ago:
It's not insurmountable. Spam filters have been around for
decades. They're pretty good. If I didn't expect the email,
I train my spam filter that it's a bad email. There are a
few that get through, maybe 1-5 a week, which require
flagging.
The checkboxes seem to be a placebo. Sometimes there isn't
one. Sometimes it doesn't do anything. Sometimes they say
"updates on your order", which apparently also means future
products you might want to buy a week after you receive
your order. (Marketers' English seems like a foreign
language to me).
xboxnolifes wrote 17 hours 42 min ago:
It's definitely not insurmountable. It just takes a little
bit of inbox maintenance. Pressing unsubscribe and report
when I have spam in the inbox, 5 seconds here, 5 seconds
there. I still get spam, but it's minuscule compared to not
doing this.
Gigachad wrote 18 hours 8 min ago:
I just flag every marketing email as spam. It's much more
effective than unsubscribing since it tells your email
provider to just redirect everything from them to spam, and
it causes trouble for the sender.
account42 wrote 9 hours 47 min ago:
Exactly. Unsubscribe is for newsletters you consciously
subscribed to but no longer want. Anything unsolicited
that isn't a genuine one to one communication is spam and
all the "unsubscribe" option does is verify that your
email is active and will be able to receive more spam.
_carbyau_ wrote 18 hours 57 min ago:
> Emails from every site sheâs ever shopped at.
This too is frustrating. Spam is not allowed unless you have
a "prior relationship".
But fuck me, that single toddler's bike I bought many years
ago for my then toddler no longer qualifies as us having a
relationship.
nathanmills wrote 21 hours 23 min ago:
Then why is it whenever I watch someone use their computer they
always accept cookies?
matheusmoreira wrote 17 hours 45 min ago:
Because people don't actually read what they are clicking on or
even understand what they're doing. They just want to make the
annoying banner go away. Same reason why people mash the next
button when installing software.
al_borland wrote 20 hours 4 min ago:
They are choosing the lowest friction option.
crote wrote 20 hours 16 min ago:
Because companies are trying really hard to hide the "no"
button: it's a single click to say "yes to all", but a safari
through dialogues to say "no to all"
Same with websites like Youtube who don't understand a plain
"no" but offer a fake choice between "yes, harvest all my data"
and "ask me again later". That isn't consent, it's coercion.
cassianoleal wrote 20 hours 57 min ago:
1. accepting cookies is not the same as opting-in to
advertisement
2. because most of the time, any other option is bloody
inconvenient
dijksterhuis wrote 22 hours 1 min ago:
periodically open the app every few minutes or so. once the driver
is 5 minutes away -- go outside and wait.
it's a tradeoff. eliminating notification spam means behaving more
synchronously when booking a taxi. i don't mind waiting outside for
five minutes. especially if i'm not getting a random ping when i'm
definitely not booking a taxi :shrugs:
volemo wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
I prefer temporarily toggling notifications on because I really
donât trust my internal metronome.
goykasi wrote 19 hours 16 min ago:
You could set a short timer on your phone. On an iphone, its
two clicks away.
pseudalopex wrote 14 hours 14 min ago:
Enabling notifications is not difficult. And the driver could
arrive before or after the initial estimate.
lanerobertlane wrote 22 hours 2 min ago:
If I order an Uber, I already know it is coming. I was the person
who ordered it.
This is how taxis worked for decades before smartphones existed.
You phoned for a taxi, then remained vaguely aware that it would
arrive shortly.
The question is whether a single âit has arrivedâ notification
is worth the surrounding noise: âdriver acceptedâ, âdriver is
nearbyâ, ârate your driverâ, âhereâs 10% off your next
rideâ, and so on.
In most cases, it is not. The useful information is either already
obvious (you can see the car outside) or you have re-opened the app
to check where they are.
Operational and marketing notifications should never share the same
permission. Until that is enforced at the OS level, I will treat
them all as unnecessary spam.
milch wrote 2 hours 53 min ago:
The difference is that taxis would either give you a call that
they were here or they'd just wait for. They don't care either
way if you show up or not because the meter is running. The Uber
is gone if you don't show up in 5 minutes. That is if you are
lucky and the driver didn't mark themselves as "here" when they
were 2 blocks away, which seems to be the norm here now.
drstewart wrote 12 hours 25 min ago:
>If I order an Uber, I already know it is coming. I was the
person who ordered it.
Which makes me wonder why you have notifications for your bank
and Whatsapp enabled.
If I have an account, I know what transactions are coming out of
it. I was the person who owned the account.
If I have someone's number, I know if I want to see messages from
them. I was the person who gave them my number.
Seems really sill that you have notifications enabled for those
apps. If you care about missing something, you'd just check them
anyway.
lanerobertlane wrote 8 hours 59 min ago:
I have notifications enabled for my bank because it may alert
me to transactions which were not made by me, and because it
does not abuse that permission to send me marketing spam.
I have WhatsApp notifications enabled because it is the primary
way people communicate where I live. If my elderly mother
messages or calls me, it will most likely be through WhatsApp.
Both of those notifications contain genuinely important or
time-sensitive information which may require action on my part.
That's the distinction between them. A person contacting me is
fundamentally different from a brand attempting to engage me.
Transaction alerts are fundamentally different from âyour
order is out for deliveryâ.
The criteria is not âdid a thing happenâ. It's whether the
notification gives meaningful new information that is important
or time-sensitive, and requires me to take action.
Most app notifications fail that test completely.
high_na_euv wrote 11 hours 26 min ago:
>If I have an account, I know what transactions are coming out
of it. I was the person who owned the account.
What if you receive notification about transaction that you
didnt make? :)
ianburrell wrote 20 hours 35 min ago:
Android has different types of notifications for apps and can
have them filtered separately. Unfortunately, some app makers
like Uber are bad about labeling. Google would need to enforce
labeling so transactional and advertising notifications are
separate.
leshenka wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
iOS has the thing they call âtime-sensitive notificationsâ
which is a flag you put when submitting notification that is
supposed to be Really Important Right Now. Unfortunately itâs
not easy to mute everything that is not time-sensitive
0cf8612b2e1e wrote 19 hours 5 min ago:
âBad about labelingâ is pretending that might be an
accident. Uber has repeatedly demonstrated they will do all the
dark patterns.
bossyTeacher wrote 21 hours 19 min ago:
The point of notifications is the convenience of not having to
constantly check your phone for every single app you have (amazon
delivery? just eats delivery? uber booking? claude finished its
task?).
1718627440 wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
Your house already has a built-in notification system, which
can be activated by the delivery guy, once he is physically at
your location.
bossyTeacher wrote 8 hours 5 min ago:
A built-in notification system that everyone from your local
politician asking for your vote to your Jehovah Witness
recruiter can and does abuse. Way to waste your time.
1718627440 wrote 6 hours 8 min ago:
You can silence it just as easy and in difference to the
digital alternatives, the amount of time wasted is
symmetric.
Swizec wrote 20 hours 8 min ago:
> The point of notifications is the convenience of not having
to constantly check your phone for every single app you have
(amazon delivery? just eats delivery? uber booking? claude
finished its task?).
My phone has been on DoNoDisturb since 2010 or so. Here's the
reality: I don't check for any of those things. Delivery
drivers can ring the door bell. If I'm very hungry I'll keep
the app open and check where they are. I literally do not care
to be notified about any of the things that apps want to notify
me off.
Anyone who cares to reach me knows to ring the phone twice in
case of emergency to get through DnD. Anyone else? The best
time to call is text me. Or schedule a time.
As for Claude, the point of clankers is that they work in the
background. The robot can wait, their infinite patience is a
feature.
bossyTeacher wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
I guess you probably have no dependents and never been oncall
then if you are on no disturb. For many people, having to
poll the state of multiple ongoing tasks is time consuming
itself or/and focus breaking enough that some apps are
deserving of having notifications.
Manually polling multiple items as you go around your day is
stealing valuable mental bandwidth that could be used in
better things.
Swizec wrote 4 hours 24 min ago:
Oh Iâm on essentially permanent 2nd tier oncall and
occasionally 1st tier. Pagerduty has an exception
configured. If you message me on slack it shows up on my
home screen and I will probably notice in the next 15
minutes or so.
I find polling less disruptive because my phone or watch
are almost always nearby. Being in control of when to get
interrupted feels better than having stuff constantly pop
up while youâre doing something.
Just holding my partnerâs phone spikes my cortizol. You
try to type 2 sentences and get 5 notifications for random
other apps and messages popping up on screen in the
meantime. Literally one notification every 10 seconds on
average. Itâs horrible
bossyTeacher wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
You know it is not a binary option, right? You can select
what apps you want notifications from and most apps have
at least two types of notifications you can toggle.
dwedge wrote 6 hours 41 min ago:
> Manually polling multiple items as you go around your day
is stealing valuable mental bandwidth that could be used in
better things.
I both agree and disagree with you. I disabled
notifications for everything and found myself refreshing
email too often. But if I have the notifications, I can get
disturbed too often which also takes mental bandwidth.
For me I found the best tactic was to selectively enable
notifications (whatsapp for just one person), and delete
(not silence) everything else - I don't have email on my
phone now - the temptation to check it is more than the
need to have it. As for things like PagerDuty, I have it
send an SMS and phone me instead.
bossyTeacher wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
> the best tactic was to selectively enable
notifications (whatsapp for just one person), and delete
(not silence) everything else
Hundred percent agree. I wouldn't support having
notifications for everything enabled.
grahamburger wrote 16 hours 33 min ago:
Same here! If this phone made an unexpected sound I'd smash
it with a brick.
OtomotO wrote 20 hours 53 min ago:
And the inconvenience to constantly having to check your phone
showmypost wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
Most people arenât aware but there are laws that require granular
notification consent. For example the GDPR has it. Iâm currently
fighting with a major bank and educating them about my rights. I
want to receive security related notifications but not get spammed
by âget a loan up to 50k without lifting a fingerâ type of
bulls*. Send send this almost every week..
ornornor wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
I donât know about uber specifically but most of the apps I use
have a separate toggle for things like marketing. Maybe itâs an
EU thing?
unglaublich wrote 21 hours 56 min ago:
That's how the design is supposed to work. But marketing realizes
that no one voluntarily receives ads, so they mix em.
swatcoder wrote 22 hours 0 min ago:
The modern pattern in anywhere that allows it is to have dozens
of ambiguously labeled toggles for nominally different
notification channels, described only by a minimally brief and
maximally ambiguous label. All begin as active until the user, in
frustration, goes in and exhausts themselves disabling individual
options without being sure which one is going to turn off the one
single thing they actually want to be notified about.
Then next month, you create a new notification channel for your
new promotional messages because too many people opted out of the
old channels. You default that new channel to opt in, to make
sure the user gets their chance to experience it and share in the
delight you mean to share with them.
Presumably, you continue this until you have hundreds of such
toggles and presumably some kind of dedicated Toggle Engineering
Department that oversees them all. Nextdoor, Meta apps, LinkedIn,
and countless others all appear to be competing for the most such
toggles.
mjmas wrote 20 hours 3 min ago:
Though Android does help a little for existing toggles by
giving you an 'About 129 notifications per day' blurb below the
entry.
hunter2_ wrote 17 hours 10 min ago:
It also puts a throbbing highlight (for a few seconds) on
whichever channel is associated with the notification whose
gear icon you used as a shortcut into the channel list. At
least for Pixel phones.
throwway120385 wrote 20 hours 42 min ago:
After all we wouldn't want the user to miss out on our
promotion of 10% off your next refrigerator. They bought a
refrigerator from us just 6 months ago, after all!
Analemma_ wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
And the worst part is that Apple could fix this in a heartbeat.
Uber is straightforwardly in violation of App Store policies about
"no advertising in push notifications", but a) they're too big to
fail and b) Apple advertises via push notifications all the fucking
time, so they have no leg to stand on here.
It's infuriating that the one thing the App Store monopoly could be
useful for isn't even actually used in practice (if you're big
enough, ofc, you and me get to eat shit if we try to evade App
Store policy).
Gigachad wrote 18 hours 5 min ago:
Presumably enforcing this would trigger an immediate legal
response where Uber claims Apple is using their monopolistic
control over the App Store.
vhcr wrote 20 hours 10 min ago:
Instagram is the worst offender, I only want to receive message
notifications, but I got notifications about inane random stuff
I've tried to disable but it won't work. I ended up having to
disable notifications altogether.
aurmc wrote 19 hours 7 min ago:
Instagram drove me so insane with that that I spent a while
searching through the app to figure out how to disable it.
There's a way to do it, and for a while it worked; I only got
notifications about things like direct messages and posts from
a few people I specifically told it to send notifications for,
but I never got the "recommended" posts.
Then I got a replacement iPhone and reinstalled Instagram.app,
and it defaulted to "show you notifications for everything we
think you might be interested in" again, and I was too lazy to
spend all that time relearning how to disable those
notifications. I disabled the notifications entirely and now I
open the app once a week or so to check in.
I had to do the same thing with Facebook years ago. Now I open
it once a month to see who from high school got married in the
last month and click the little "heart" icon and scroll until I
get bored (~2 minutes). Can't trust Zuck with notifications.
coro_1 wrote 15 hours 17 min ago:
> Now I open it once a month
So do I. Login on the web incognito.
iamacyborg wrote 20 hours 4 min ago:
Instagram run their notifications via an auction mechanism
(which I suppose makes sense for an advertising company that
likely built a lot of RTB systems).
URI [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04835
mmoskal wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
I believe the App Store policy is you have to have a setting to
disable ads. And Uber actually has it (though it has 8 different
channels or so, apparently "Uber teen accounts" marketing was
added recently).
I used the setting and am not getting Uber ads (only Uber ride
notifications).
lathiat wrote 17 hours 49 min ago:
Currently my biggest problem isn't ads, it's all the apps now
will find ANY excuse to send you a notification in order to
keep their "Daily Active User" count high.
You turn off more and more categories and they'll still find a
reason.
pants2 wrote 20 hours 59 min ago:
I would love if Apple enforced that rule, but they certainly
don't
liotier wrote 22 hours 23 min 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 !
pants2 wrote 21 hours 0 min ago:
I definitely run all my emails through an LLM filter and wish I
could do the same for push notifications!
nixosbestos wrote 22 hours 22 min 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 wrote 8 hours 18 min 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.
e40 wrote 22 hours 36 min 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.
hnlmorg wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
For Slack, I find just changing the default notification sound to a
simple and subtle ding works well.
When Iâm focused, I donât hear it because itâs too subtle.
But when Iâm not concentrating on anything, itâs more
noticeable and I donât mind the distraction.
This might not work for everyone (âYMMVâ and all), but Iâve
personally found it a very effective yet simple solution.
fastasucan wrote 22 hours 26 min ago:
If you are very present on slack, ofcourse you dont feel that you
are interruped.
e40 wrote 21 hours 19 min 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.
elliottkember wrote 22 hours 29 min 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.
e40 wrote 21 hours 18 min 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.
exmadscientist wrote 22 hours 15 min 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.)
TheNewsIsHere wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
Absolutely agreed.
How much time must everyone be asked to waste to âtuneâ 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
itâs not as if trends cannot be discerned.
How ridiculous would it be to be told âif you donât want
people constantly barging into your office, lock the doorâ?
e40 wrote 21 hours 17 min 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.
Tyr42 wrote 22 hours 57 min 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?
mikaeluman wrote 23 hours 1 min 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.
sor1nmarkov wrote 10 hours 49 min ago:
"having to constantly fight to turn off all permission allowances
every time I install an app"
Are you really installing that many apps that this is so hard?
thewebguyd wrote 22 hours 20 min ago:
> 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.
I've found that live activities on iOS helps with this quite a bit.
Let's me keep notifications disabled on parking apps and DoorDash
while still getting the tracking info I want in the live activity &
dynamic island.
Otherwise, yeah, you just can't trust anyone to be respectful with
notifications. Phone & a messages whitelist via focus modes are the
only notifications I allow on my phone.
thisislife2 wrote 22 hours 26 min 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 wrote 22 hours 19 min 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 wrote 22 hours 8 min ago:
On iOS it wouldnât even be that hard. Thereâs already a
toggle to disable use of cellular connectivity. Add a separate
one for non-cellular (iPadOS can connect via Ethernet), and/or a
âdisallow allâ toggle.
We are partly there in spirit with App Transparency keeping track
of the IPs and hostnames apps connect to.
thisislife2 wrote 10 hours 11 min ago:
Apparently chinese versions of ios (specifically for China)
already have this feature because the Chinese government
mandates it!
sparselogic wrote 23 hours 1 min 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 receiverâs interests being opposed.
aidenn0 wrote 19 hours 22 min 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.
iamacyborg wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
A fairly uncharitable read, Iâd argue it states that the platform
is acting on the platformâs interest, not the userâs.
sparselogic wrote 20 hours 48 min 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.
toast0 wrote 23 hours 5 min 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 wrote 23 hours 0 min ago:
Huh thatâs interesting, do you have any further context on that?
Iâve 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 wrote 22 hours 33 min 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.
Perz1val wrote 2 hours 38 min ago:
Hmm, there's just a few big messaging apps and just a few os
vendors, weird that you couldn't have established special
treatment for pushes about user to user messages
toast0 wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
Well... Blackberry wasn't very interested in increasing our
push quota (but they eventually did). Apple is Apple ...
getting them to make exceptions is very hard. Android push
problems were more often on-device, which Google can't really
help with; even when it was their software, they're not going
to set it up to make exceptions. Nokia and Microsoft did try to
be helpful with pushes... but their platforms are gone. Nokia
S60 never had push, but those devices were very good at staying
connected to our servers.
All that said, it's not like the platform developers are fully
in the wrong when they're reducing pushes. It does have an
impact on battery life, and if users aren't acting on them
quickly, maybe the platform shouldn't either, even if there's
risks when delaying communication.
balderdash wrote 23 hours 7 min 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
gumby271 wrote 15 hours 21 min ago:
If you're on Android, I'll always recommend Buzzkill to add very
granular rules for notification filtering. I set up all kinds of
filters just for the Amazon app.
On iOS I assume you're sol, that notification system is unhinged to
my eyes.
aidenn0 wrote 19 hours 25 min ago:
I just turn off all notifications for any app that sends me marketing
notifications.
antiframe wrote 16 hours 16 min ago:
You are less charitable than me. Maybe I'll adopt your approach. I
first give an app the benefit of the doubt and go into the apps
notification preferences and see if I can fine-tune their
notifications. If not, off for all at the OS-level. If yes, I tweak
it, but if I get surprised by one later, off for all at the
OS-level or uninstall. It's especially annoying because I don't
have notifications shown on my home screen and need to unlock with
a pin so if I go through the trouble of unlocking my phone to spam
and I extra annoyed with the app.
asdff wrote 21 hours 9 min ago:
Too bad about the walled garden or you'd have this tweak already
installed years ago.
tencentshill wrote 22 hours 52 min 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 wrote 15 hours 3 min 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 wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
I'd say most people don't though, and those people might be more
influential to advertisements anyways so it's a net win for them.
iamacyborg wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
That would be nice. I wouldnât be surprised, as on-phone models get
more capable, if we donât see them start to build an âinboxâ
like we see with email where you can then start seeing much more
heavy processing happening.
gumby271 wrote 22 hours 54 min 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 wrote 22 hours 51 min ago:
Makes sense, Google definitely have a lot more experience in that
space with gmail than Apple do.
toomuchtodo wrote 23 hours 12 min 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 wrote 23 hours 8 min ago:
You think there might be some sort of interaction between both facets
there?
How is bad summarisation good for a user, for example?
AlexandrB wrote 5 hours 33 min 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).
nickburns wrote 20 hours 53 min 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 valueâno.
TheNewsIsHere wrote 22 hours 5 min 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 doesnât get those
privileges.
iamacyborg wrote 22 hours 2 min ago:
I largely do the same, and keep my phone on dnd mode.
nateguchi wrote 23 hours 15 min 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.
EZ-E wrote 14 hours 41 min 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 wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
In-app notifications settings should do this if they are
trustworthy.
lukeschlather wrote 16 hours 30 min ago:
I've definitely had notifications I consider spam direct from Google
before. Apple/Google are not trustworthy.
ghostly_s wrote 19 hours 4 min 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.
hithre wrote 19 hours 27 min 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.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote 22 hours 47 min 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 wrote 22 hours 28 min 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 wrote 22 hours 9 min ago:
like I said, you decide by muting or removing the offending app.
whstl wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
Fine, but thatâs was clearly not enough to stop the spam, nor
it was enough to satisfy everyone.
There are some apps I canât afford to mute or uninstall, such
as phone, transportation, communication and work. I wish I
could, but I currently canât, Iâm not privileged enough.
âPunishment by Appleâ in this instance is somehow the only
response anyone had to misbehaving companies.
TheNewsIsHere wrote 22 hours 12 min 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 Eatâs constant marketing
abuse and they lose APNs access for the Bundle ID associated with
the spam reports. For example.
nickf wrote 21 hours 58 min ago:
Youâre right of course, but Apple wonât do it - theyâre
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 thereâs no way
to actually contact them to complain, of course). Doordash
wonât let me get delivery notifications without marketing
notifications.
Apple could fully enforce their policies and fix this in a
heartbeat, but they wonât.
thisislife2 wrote 22 hours 47 min 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 wrote 22 hours 33 min 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 / Appleâs
summarizing disappear thereâs 0 reason to say it wasnât control
passing purely to the consumer.
So Iâm left a bit empty as the high-minded purpose has little
backing, and thus comes across as bloviating.
baxtr wrote 22 hours 47 min 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 Iâm sure itâs possible to turn off the marketing messages.
But I bet most people donât know and wonât change that. Itâs
super annoying.
no-name-here wrote 17 hours 46 min ago:
> Iâm sure itâs possible to turn off the marketing messages.
Uber may have that functionality, but a surprising number of other
apps don't - for example Makro, Tops, and 7/11 Thailand, three very
popular Thailand retailers, use notifications for when an order is
out for delivery, about to arrive, etc. But they also send constant
promotion notifications every day, even with audio alerts enabled.
GCUMstlyHarmls wrote 16 hours 46 min ago:
We must, at some point surely, reach an inflection where even
everyday people are sick of this shit and start smashing their
phones right?
There has always been "unpluggers" [0] amongst technologists, but
the vibes are bad and getting worse. I feel like that is getting
more common between "normal" people I know, but maybe outside of
my country town bubble its not happening.
I was thinking we're only one or two big influencers away from a
cascade, but then the ultra-influencers are never really going to
commit because its their livelyhood and saying throw your phone
away is self-limiting on the viral aspect.
I guess we're just stuck under the boot.
^0
URI [1]: https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-en...
Traubenfuchs wrote 13 hours 37 min ago:
> We must, at some point surely, reach an inflection where even
everyday people are sick of this shit and start smashing their
phones right?
Never underestimate the ignorance of the average personâ¦
I am talking about those people who consume content while ads
blink around the content in a all four directions and they
donât even actively notice.
i7l wrote 30 min ago:
Most people I know who are bombarded by worthless updates
every minute either ignore them but don't bother to disable
any or are glued to their phones anyway, so they are beyond
help.
TheNewsIsHere wrote 22 hours 22 min 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 didnât
recognize the sender, etcâ¦)
But I digress.
whstl wrote 22 hours 28 min 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 wrote 22 hours 12 min 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!
iamacyborg wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
And soon, those appointment reminders might quietly be dismissed by
your phone without you being any the wiser.
tcdent wrote 22 hours 49 min 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.
iamacyborg wrote 23 hours 8 min ago:
Not upset, but increasingly concerned that all channels are being
intermediated by big tech.
supriyo-biswas wrote 13 hours 8 min 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 wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
Iâd recommend following your own train of thought, why is big
tech so hell bent on intermediating the experience between their
users and everyone else? Theyâve done it for email, web search,
mobile experiences, advertising, etc.
You want to use any of those things, youâll have to pay their
toll booth, figuratively or literally.
nyx wrote 11 hours 8 min 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.
iamacyborg wrote 10 hours 13 min ago:
If we had visibility, we would know what doesn't work and we
would stop sending it. Almost like there are aligned
interests there rather than a purely adversarial
relationship.
supriyo-biswas wrote 9 hours 16 min ago:
Personally, all I've seen is marketers not getting the
message and using it to perform A/B testing to come up with
the basest ad they could possibly come up with to entrap
more users.
iamacyborg wrote 8 hours 49 min ago:
One could take an equally uncharitable approach to what
engineers and product teams do.
Perseids wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
Yes and that would be completely correct in many cases.
> Almost like there are aligned interests there rather
than a purely adversarial relationship.
You might very well be the exception, but for something
like 99% of marketing content that reaches me, our
interests aren't aligned. First of all, they want to
generate "needs" where there weren't any before and
probably shouldn't be. A pizza ad produces the wish for
unhealthy food. A fashion ad produces the wish for new
clothes (even though I have enough) and probably even
changes the societal dynamics of individual expression
and personal style to be consumption oriented.
Second, even if I have a legitimate need for a
solution, they still want me to buy their product,
consume their media, give my attention to them. I, on
the other hand, want to be informed by a neutral third
party about the pros and cons of some product. Sure you
can say "but unhappy customers are bad for us", but
there are actually very few niches, where this signal
is powerful enough to align incentives, because
information and power asymmetry limit the customers
understanding of product quality and their leverage to
correct harmful market dynamics.
dodobirdlord wrote 11 hours 51 min 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 wrote 11 hours 6 min ago:
Do you think that logic holds true for web search as well?
Because this is happening there in a much stronger way too.
Forgeties79 wrote 23 hours 10 min ago:
>discovery
I canât think of a single app I want a âDiscoverâ tab on
anymore. The moment you include one is the moment there is someone
trying to game it. I definitely donât want push notifications
trying to show me something new. Iâm 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)
bigyabai wrote 23 hours 15 min 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:
URI [1]: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_pu...
iamacyborg wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
Iâm in the UK so I donât catch all us news, good spot though
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