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What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

jacquescorbytuech.com

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Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#151

Post by dmitrygr »

> 2 to 5 notifications per week is the optimal range for most apps and exceeding it materially increases uninstalls;

Wow. Y’all must be much more tolerant of your time being wasted than i am. One notification from an app I didn’t 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)

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#152

Post by tonymet »

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.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#153

Post by _carbyau_ »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #100
iamacyborg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of thousands of people declaratively opt into receiving marketing with informed consent on a daily basis. Just because you don’t does not mean other people are like you.

Yes… seeing my wife’s email inbox is mind blowing. Maybe she didn’t opt in, but she will never unsubscribe from anything. Emails from every site she’s ever shopped at.

> Emails from every site she’s 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.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#154

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #150
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

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.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#155

Post by array_key_first »

pants2 wrote: post #31
lanerobertlane wrote: post #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 matter…

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.

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.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#156

Post by svachalek »

lanerobertlane wrote: post #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 matter…

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.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#157

Post by al_borland »

criddell wrote: post #133
al_borland wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the retailer asking for a phone number, I don’t 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.

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. It’s probably time to do something similar for email. Not in my address book? Straight to trash.

Adding a filter is still extra work for me. Saying “no” 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. I’ve 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 doesn’t actually do anything anymore.

Doing this to email is an interesting idea. If sitting in one ecosystem, maybe it would work. I’m fractured, so it’s a non-starter. Even beyond that, I think it would be an issue as there are real emails I do want to get which I’d never add to my address book, as I’d never send an email to the address. I think I’d 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] https://herman.bearblog.dev/digital-hygiene-emails/

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#158

Post by array_key_first »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #100
iamacyborg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of thousands of people declaratively opt into receiving marketing with informed consent on a daily basis. Just because you don’t does not mean other people are like you.

Yes… seeing my wife’s email inbox is mind blowing. Maybe she didn’t opt in, but she will never unsubscribe from anything. Emails from every site she’s ever shopped at.

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.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#159

Post by nickburns »

iamalizard wrote: post #120
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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…

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.

Re: What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

#160

Post by inventor7777 »

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 https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notif...

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