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What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

jacquescorbytuech.com

21–30 of 428 posts

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#21

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.

Agreed. I have a doc appointment app, where I like the notifications to be on for reminders etc.

Lately they started sending marketing messages through that channel. Now I’m sure it’s possible to turn off the marketing messages. But I bet most people don’t know and won’t change that. It’s super annoying.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#22

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.

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.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#23

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.

> (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.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#24
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.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#25
post #21

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.

Agreed. I have a doc appointment app, where I like the notifications to be on for reminders etc. Lately they started sending marketing messages through that channel. Now I’m sure it’s possible to turn off the marketing messages. But I bet most people don’t know and won’t change that. It’s super annoying.

And soon, those appointment reminders might quietly be dismissed by your phone without you being any the wiser.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#26

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 matter…

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.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#28
post #10

> 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…

Huh that’s interesting, do you have any further context on that? I’ve not worked on a product with anywhere near that scale before so monitoring has always been whatever I can get from commercial push platforms

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.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#29

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.

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 judg…

Been an app developer since 2009, worked on Android for 6 years at Google. Push notifications suck, users hate them.

Simultaneously, I cannot match the pull quote, an argument summary, to their argumentation. IIUC if the reword patent / Apple’s summarizing disappear there’s 0 reason to say it wasn’t control passing purely to the consumer.

So I’m left a bit empty as the high-minded purpose has little backing, and thus comes across as bloviating.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#30
post #26

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 matter…

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 me…

> 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.

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