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Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

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Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#121

Post by grishka »

cypressious wrote: post #34
TylerE wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wish they added (and enforced!) a distinction between transactional notifications and everything else.

Android forces app developers to categorize notifications (the API is called notification channels). Each channel can be muted individually in the system settings. Though it's up to the app makers to correctly categorize their notifications, in my experience most apps do this. Whenever I see a spam notification, I immediatelly go mute the channel and the problem never repeats itself.

> Android forces app developers to categorize notifications (the API is called notification channels).

There's nothing to force you to be honest. It only forces you to specify a channel when you post a notification. You can as well just create a single one for everything, which is exactly what some apps do.

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#122

Post by grishka »

gruez wrote: post #118
ranting-moth wrote: post #54

I might be in the minority group. But any app that sends me a push notification that I haven't specifically opted in for is going to have all notification privilege removed right away. A lot of the time it's actually a reminder for me to uninstall the app.

>But any app that sends me a push notification that I haven't specifically opted in for is going to have all notification privilege removed right away. I thought both android and ios has opt-in notifications? In other words if you're receiving a notification, you already explicitly opted into them at some point.

Android does have opt-in notifications now, but it's a very recent change.

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#123

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

sakjur wrote: post #50
ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t assume that a push notification is going to be shown to the user. It may be for consumption only by the app, to avoid the need for polling a remote server. I expected this article to discuss push-notification payloads and use cases, but no… it’s about spamming the user about products. It’s as if the author doesn’t even understand what push notifications are.

Good point, in my case when I say “delivered”, I primarily mean the phone notifying the user.

Understood. Just wanted to bring this up because the article ignores most of the possibilities of push notifications.

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#124

Post by twism »

joshmanders wrote: post #86
twism wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so many examples of this type of anti-competitive strategy already being used. why implement something with known deficiencies?

Because you're taking the solution to the absolute bare minimum implementation to achieve the desired result and then applying a ton of thoughts and considerations on how to get around THAT implementation and saying "Yeah this is gonna get abused" and throw your hands in the air. Or you could think just as hard about blocking it as you do about circumventing it, like in the case of this scenario, add weight to users.…

i guess the solution in the comment i described as anticompetitive is solving a problem that really isn't a problem ... you have the ability to turn off notifications (or notification channels in the case of Android) if they seem spammy. why is the mothership turning off notifications for an app due to heuristics of a broad set of users.

if i don't want the notification i'll disable/silence/mute/lower the priority of it either on installation of the app or when it starts to offend.

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#125

Post by twism »

grishka wrote: post #120
twism wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android has notifications channels ... mute the spam/ad ones. I only have the payment and delivery status channels on alert, the others are not muted but "silent" (i.e. the show up in the notification tray but doesn't alert me). you do get some deals sometimes. Android gets a lot of shit for a lot of things but the notification is top-notch ... on iOS it seems like an afterthought (e.g. how long it took for iOS to ge…

> mute the spam/ad ones Some apps think their stupid spam is important enough to have a single notification channel for both the spam and actually important stuff like order status.

their fault i'm muting all the relevant notifications including the spam ones. leading to poor UX. leading to the uninstallation of said app

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#126

Post by jjcm »

sakjur wrote: post #30

Something I wish Apple and Google would support is notifications that are only delivered if you’ve opened the app during the last 2 hours. Taxi and food delivery services for example have a reasonable usecase for push notifications, but only around the time when I’ve opened the apps. I think adding such dials to the operating system could help align the user interest of not being spammed with the engagement metrics u…

I wish I could approve specific template strings for notifications. I want things like "%s replied to your comment". I don't want things like, "%s is %d% off this week!".

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#127

Post by twism »

JohnFen wrote: post #107
twism wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so many examples of this type of anti-competitive strategy already being used. why implement something with known deficiencies?

> why implement something with known deficiencies? That argument could equally be used to argue that push notifications shouldn't be implemented at all.

push notifications and the ability to silence them is fine ... there's no issue to solve here other than the misconception that notifications can't be turned off per app basis unless the app store does it for you

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#128

Post by joshmanders »

twism wrote: post #124
joshmanders wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you're taking the solution to the absolute bare minimum implementation to achieve the desired result and then applying a ton of thoughts and considerations on how to get around THAT implementation and saying "Yeah this is gonna get abused" and throw your hands in the air. Or you could think just as hard about blocking it as you do about circumventing it, like in the case of this scenario, add weight to users.…

i guess the solution in the comment i described as anticompetitive is solving a problem that really isn't a problem ... you have the ability to turn off notifications (or notification channels in the case of Android) if they seem spammy. why is the mothership turning off notifications for an app due to heuristics of a broad set of users. if i don't want the notification i'll disable/silence/mute/lower the priority of…

Because there needs to be some kind of penalty for being a shitty person to your users.

Like I get it, marketing matters a lot, and being able to market to your existing users is something that makes sure companies survive and I accept that.

But because I find your app worthy of being on my phone doesn't mean I find your desire to constantly control what I'm looking at on my device or take away from that. And I think personally as the device manufacture its your job to safeguard YOUR customers too with the ability for them to report nefarious apps.

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#129

Post by stackskipton »

IncandescentGas wrote: post #95

These regularly spaced and frequent junk notifications are so important to tech companies because they drive product addiction. Interrupting your day 16 times forcing someone to decide to scroll their feed yet again today, until they're as helpless as Pavlov's dog. How is this kind of computer science any more ethical than the chemists who worked to modify tobacco to be more addictive? Apple and Google are complicit…

I'm shocked Apple hasn't tried to fix it and use it as selling point. Smartphone companies don't need to hook the user anymore, almost everyone is high on the smack at this point.

Re: Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often

#130

Post by JohnFen »

twism wrote: post #127
JohnFen wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why implement something with known deficiencies? That argument could equally be used to argue that push notifications shouldn't be implemented at all.

push notifications and the ability to silence them is fine ... there's no issue to solve here other than the misconception that notifications can't be turned off per app basis unless the app store does it for you

The issue here is that the abuse of push notifications makes push notifications borderline worthless. That's why I don't allow them at all on my machines. The value they provide is swamped out by the abuse of them.
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