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Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

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Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#31

I run my phone on DND all day, everyday and block notifications from almost all apps. The amount of garbage we have vying for our attention on an hourly basis is overwhelming sometimes. The worst is the apps where you do want notifications on, like your food delivery apps so you know when your food is at the door, but those companies take that as an invite to send you daily marketing notifications and it all feels li…

Maybe Apple should add a similar distinction between transactional and marketing notifications as we have with email.

[deleted]

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#32

AI bros, listen up Make an app that scans those notifications and takes an action automatically.

AFAIK, an app can’t influence notifications from other apps. At least on iOS. Less sure about Android. This is something that has to come from the OS level.

on Android you can set an app as an accessibility service to read notifications and as an assistant to make actions.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#33
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber Eats. I need the notifications for a taxi not marketing for groceries during the week

Push notifications are the next regulatory target after cookies.

I can't wait until I start getting bombarded with push notifications telling me I need to update my push notification consent settings.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#34
Jonathan Haidt has done a great job advocating this problem and is writing a book coming out this next year called "The Anxious Generation":

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/phone-free-schools

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/sapien-smartphone-repor...

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

This isn't something that can be solved with "better tech". It is something that is solved with "less tech" or "no tech" entirely.

I wrote a book on this topic too as a millennial who grew up as one of the first waves of smartphones and social media users. I firmly believe it contributed to mental health challenges. We need to find a point where we say we've had "enough".

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#35
post #5

Everybody is. I'm strongly of the opinion that all this 'needy tech' is a net negative and I try hard to keep it out of my life. But some of it, mostly associated with my kids schooling, is very hard to avoid. 10 emails per week about some school portal with 'an important message' (which you need to separately logged into, of course the message is so important that it can't be entrusted to mere email, even though the…

I just checked and there are 16 messages from one school in the last 7 days. The other school have managed 11. Those are emails, containing PDFs, containing important dates, if you can find them.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#36

I run my phone on DND all day, everyday and block notifications from almost all apps. The amount of garbage we have vying for our attention on an hourly basis is overwhelming sometimes. The worst is the apps where you do want notifications on, like your food delivery apps so you know when your food is at the door, but those companies take that as an invite to send you daily marketing notifications and it all feels li…

Snapchat is like this, it's a communication app so you want the notifications on, but they flood it with marketing. And they refuse to use Android's notification "channels" to segment their notifications. Google should start enforcing that in their Play Store reviews.

Just piling on here: Snapchat is the absolute worst.

It's stunning to me that Google let's them get away with pushing ads through notifications.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#37
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is terrible at it.

Uber Eats. I need the notifications for a taxi not marketing for groceries during the week

I’m pretty sure this violates Apple’s App Store policies, but they seem to not care. Apple even sometimes abuses their notifications to promote new App Store releases and other Apple services.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#38
My kid (soon to be 11 years old) has this problem and is (almost) driving me nuts. There are three causes of this:

1) He's dumb. Will click and install on any crap he comes by.

2) He doesn't know to operate his phone. Every now and then I take his phone and turn off notifications for the apps I saw that popped them.

#3: This one's mysterious to me as well. Somehow they (the notifications) get re-enabled back. I'm disabling notifications (to the best of my knowledge, navigating arcane settings paths), they disappear for some time then after a while, start popping again. No app ever asked me "I noticed you turned off notifications ... ahem, do you want them turned back on?". No, they just turn it back automatically ... when I navigate back to the arcane settings path hidden under some 3 to 7 unintuitive menu layers.. the setting's back on. Think "Settings .. Privacy protection .. special permissions ... notification access" ... each of these steps hidden among 10 to 20 other menu options. What chances does a kid have to fight this crap?

I dunno, just using the apps seems to enable them after a while. And it's not just "Malware Disguised As Game XYZ". YouTube, Netflix, Facebook... all these bounce back, on my phone as well. Just seems that not so often as on my kid's and also I disable them back promptly when it happens so it's a manageable level of annoyance.

My kid's phone though ... I call him and he doesn't reply. Why? Coze he turns the sound volume off, just so he can have some peace of mind. Otherwise it's "ping ping ping ping", relentlessly throughout the day and night.

>> From the article: "Half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications a day" .

That seems about right. It's maddening. Barely manageable as a tech-aware adult, in the hands of a kid, today's phone technology and it's inability to stop this crap it's the incarnation of evil.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#39

I run my phone on DND all day, everyday and block notifications from almost all apps. The amount of garbage we have vying for our attention on an hourly basis is overwhelming sometimes. The worst is the apps where you do want notifications on, like your food delivery apps so you know when your food is at the door, but those companies take that as an invite to send you daily marketing notifications and it all feels li…

Snapchat is like this, it's a communication app so you want the notifications on, but they flood it with marketing. And they refuse to use Android's notification "channels" to segment their notifications. Google should start enforcing that in their Play Store reviews.

Even Google "can't" follow their own rules, and mix transactional and marketing notifications in same channels.

Re: Teens inundated with phone prompts day and night, research finds

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Apple should add a similar distinction between transactional and marketing notifications as we have with email.

They do. They call them "time sensitive" notifications. You can use the "Focus" feature to delay less important types of notifications into a big batch at a specified time. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212608

It's been asking me about these and from what it tells me on my phone I don't understand what they are getting at.

But more importantly, how does it differentiate between "Your delivery has arrived" and "this weekend, 10% off all deliveries paid with mastercard from chase banks"

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