Apple rescinding the rule that banned promotional notifications is one of the worst UX decisions they’ve ever made.
I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones
111–120 of 366 posts
Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones
#112Lyft does the same thing. I need the normal notifications ("Your driver will arrive in 2 minutes") but every few weeks they send me a promotional notification ("Rides are 20% off on Labor Day!") randomly.
Which means I leave the app Offloaded when I'm not using it and may not go through the friction to reinstall when I need a ride.
Another comment here pointed out you can change it under the obvious /s location: Settings > Privacy > Notification Preferences > Discounts and News.
Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones
#113> Better yet, it would be great to have some sort of “disable marketing notifications” inside the app.
Given the current state of app distribution I’d rather have this _outside_ the app. Add an OS level toggle to enable or disable marketing notifications (system wide or app specific), force apps to categorize their notifications, and provide a mechanism to report bad actors. This problem creates a bad experience for all users so seems like it’s worth platform-level intervention.
Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones
#114The only way to really deter this stuff is to make it cost the sender something per spam. Bonus points if the user can feed back into the system to discourage truly unpopular notifications.
Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones
#115Yes. LinkedIn and Facebook being the worst. Even if there is nothing relevant they’ll just make something BS up just to remind you that they still exist.
Yes LinkedIn I know I’ve got 11 notifications waiting but I also know they’ll all be more noise…and I know this without needing to check
Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones
#116I've noticed this in social networks as well. If you don't get enough transactional notifications for a while they start making up fake ones like Twitter's "in case you missed this Tweet", Facebook's "[someone] posted for the first time in a while", all the while lighting up the notifications badge. Leads to a "boy who cried wolf" scenario in which I stop trusting notifications entirely and just ignore them, possibly…
I think this self awareness to disable notifications if they abuse it mostly only occurs for engineering types or other people with a lot of self control. It remains a powerful engagement trick because it hooks into the brains of people with less mental stability, like people with adhd etc (which for all the mental health awareness tech platforms tries to align themselves with would appear to have the opposite effect).
Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones
#117I have a pretty good idea on how to fix this (and many similar) problems: "hibernate app" option. Its a new app state where app icon icon has some mark (like being semi-grayed out) and all the background app services are disabled (tracking, promotional popups, periodic wakeups, etc...). The app is only un-hibernated if user explicitly clicks on it, it cannot do it by itself. The app can be hibernated by long-press me…
Lots of ways to do this on Android. Ice Box is an example of an app that all help do it for you.
Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll go one step farther and uninstall it if I haven't used it recently or often.
I'll go that one step further and cast my phone into a shallow grave, having salted the earth it's buried in so that nothing may grow there again.
I blew up a planet once.
Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones
#119I highly recommend installing Buzzkill for those on Android. In addition to built-in per-channel settings, Buzzkill allows you to create rules to auto-dismiss or do certain actions depending on the title or description of the notification, using basic matching or regex. It also gives you a nicer view of notification history, with more days and scrubbing across time if you ever want to revisit past notifications. http…
I like buzzkill, also check out FilterBox, Spren, and Notification Organizer. (Or tasker for raw power)
I find each of them have their own little quirks.
Re: I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones
#120I have a pretty good idea on how to fix this (and many similar) problems: "hibernate app" option. Its a new app state where app icon icon has some mark (like being semi-grayed out) and all the background app services are disabled (tracking, promotional popups, periodic wakeups, etc...). The app is only un-hibernated if user explicitly clicks on it, it cannot do it by itself. The app can be hibernated by long-press me…
Lots of ways to do this on Android. Ice Box is an example of an app that all help do it for you.
Ice Box seems to require root fwiw.