Are My Push Notifications Driving Users Away? | Hacker News Reader

Are My Push Notifications Driving Users Away?

mcfunley.com

42 pointsluu32 comments

While I appreciate the experimental and data-driven approach, is it really necessary? Just don't spam your users. There, done. If there's even the slightest hint of doubt that they might not want the notification, don't send it. If you only send notifications that users actually ask for you won't have this problem in the first place.

We technies like to think that any and every notification/email/etc is annoying and is like spam. But non-technical users really don't work that way and may even WANT notifications.

Examples:

- My girlfriend keeps asking me to sign up for snail mail advertisements (e.g. discounts at local stores).

- When I was performing maintenance on my mother's laptop, I saw an annoying "daily offers" ad popup from her virus scanner. I immediately went for the "Don't show this again" checkbox, but my mother stopped me in my tracks. "Don't do that! Those daily offers are useful!"

It blew my mind.

If they want it then they'll say "yes" when you ask them if they want it. Much simpler than trying to determine the consequences of unsolicited messages.

Yeah, my experiences reflect this as well. Personally, I only opt-in to 2 retailer notifications. They both reliably send me offers which I deem valuable. Everything else is nothing short of a nuisance and I opt-out almost immediately. I get overly irritated about this sort of thing :)

My mind was just blown reading your comment, but now that you mention it, my friend's mom did something similar; she had over 500px tall of toolbars in IE (7, I think). I went to uninstall them because they were all just loaded with spam and banner ads, and nonsense search bars. It was unfuckingbelievable, like more than half of her screen, but she wouldn't let me uninstall them.

These are the people who watch home shopping channels,

Presumably the effect of notifications to at least some users is that they increase engagement. If you've got more users that start using your app after a notification who weren't previously using it, than stop using your app who were previously using it, then it's a win.

For myself, while I'm annoyed at notifications, they also work on me for the apps I care about. (For apps I don't care about, I wasn't using them anyway.)

I'm not disputing that it can be a win, I'm simply saying that more basic principles like "don't spam people" should override that.

What percentage of users actually ask developers for notifications? This submission highlights a fundamental problem with notifications on iOS: there are very few fine-grained settings for notifications and very little feedback for annoying notifications. If I find certain app notifications annoying, there's very little I can do past turning off notifications for that app.

Even if you send only non-commercial notifications to users who requested them they still may uninstall your app (or for email, report as spam.)

If you are in a very competitive market for user acquisition - mobile game, Uber, crowd based delivery service, etc - 1 or 2 percentage points in behavior can be a really damn big deal. 1 or 2% uninstalling your app every week is enough to kill your viral coefficient. It would have been enough to kill Facebook.

You are notch and you just made Minecraft? Probably doesn't matter.

Lay user here. I feel a rare sense of violation whenever I find an unexpected push notification on my Android device. Perhaps it's because most of my experience is as a Windows user; if I see something 'spammy' popping up unexpectedly somewhere I might expect to see system-related or user-defined stuff, my instinctive reaction is one of suspicion than an app has wrapped itself around the OS/my device and over-stepped its invitation to be installed and used. It reminds me of malware that would pop up in the icontray of some people's Windows systems, or the 'helpful' driver control centres.

I don't think you give yourself enough credit as a user - I would suggest a more typical "lay-user" is not going to even slightly comprehend the design of the system that runs on their phone, that is, they can't much figure out what happens during installs much less envision what it means for software to "wrap" around the OS/device.

The truth is, I don't think a lot of people find notifications all that frustrating, at least not privately. Regardless of the content or how annoying it is, whenever someone's phone alerts/buzzes with new content, they tend to look. Though this is anecdotal, I can recall friends even in the tech field who would pull out the phone mid conversation to get a notification from Facebook or from a shopping app offering a 10% discount; they'd look, complain about the annoyance, put it away, and then repeat as soon as the next notification popped up.

This is a bit of a tinfoil hat theory, but I suspect that the entire structure of notifications is just designed to feel good on a certain level - even though you don't want the content, you're important because you're receiving so many notifications. No one else can see what it is you're getting, no one else knows that it's just some offer from a company, they just know that you get a lot of notifications on your phone. (Or, conversely, maybe they do know, but at the end of the day, you're the one who is so busy that you need to keep checking your phone while theirs sits idly by)

"... they'd look, complain about the annoyance, put it away, and then repeat as soon as the next notification popped up."

But I'm guessing they'd be a lot less likely to purchase anything from that entity than before the pushes. That's how I react.

Alternatively, they think that their is a chance that it is an important notification and are willing to take the chance that it is not, rather than risk missing an important one.

Perhaps; what we might think of as 'lay users' might have more dimensions to their experiences of responses, though. A lot of novice users certainly don't have much idea of what happens in an install or on the OS (at this level, technology is often 'magic'). To that end, something unanticipated can be unsettling. For example, my mum might install an app (which she can just about do). For her, she's installed it and only seems to expect to interact with it when pressing its icon. When a notification appears, it causes her to slightly panic or become uncertain about what has just happened and why, so she'll often consult me (when I'll simply swipe it away for her). It doesn't matter that the notification might give a clue about what it relates to - it's already thrown her. It's this kind of experience which makes me very reluctant to have my grandparents using a tablet because it is so unpredictable for them, despite there being some fantastic apps and functions that they could make use of to assist them in elderly living.

The worst notifications, of course, are the ones written in Chinese characters. I've no idea how to eviscerate my mum's phone of the app responsible for them.

> I feel a rare sense of violation whenever I find an unexpected push notification on my Android device.

Oh, exactly this. I remember the fist time when I got a push notification about offers nearby from a banking app. My reaction: what the fuck? Why is the banking app even running in the first place?. The violation came mostly from that a banking app has approximately zero sensible reasons for running in the background, wasting phone's resources.

Any app that shows me a notification that isn't a message or something that someone sent to me, I uninstall right away. I don't even check if there's a way to disable it unless the app is very useful.

I always thought that spam push messages were forbidden by the iOS developer TOS. The number of spam messages I actually get makes me question this. Anyone know if they're supposed to be banned or not?

If I'm feeling extremely generous, an app that sends me a spam message will get its notifications disabled forever. But most of the time it simply gets deleted and a 1-star review left on the store, and replaced with an app that doesn't spam me.

> Anyone know if they're supposed to be banned or not?

They are prohibited by App Store review guidelines 5.5 and 5.6:[1]

> 5.5 Apps that use Push Notifications to send unsolicited messages, or for the purpose of phishing or spamming will be rejected

> 5.6 Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind

Apple has responded positively to reports I've made regarding those guidelines, but it's hard to say how much of an effect it had. The DM push notifications I reported seemed to come out of the blue and were never repeated: the company could've been told by Apple to stop or they could've just been doing it as a test.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#pus...

Apple may want to expand 7 to include "Apps with an under 18 age rating may not include advertising for alcohol" (and probably gambling too).

They are not supposed to be allowed, but Apple has never enforced this, and indeed sometimes does it themselves.

Really? How often have you received push notifications from Apple - besides email notifications, App Store updates, and other genuinely useful stuff? Speaking for myself, I can't remember ever receiving a spammy notification _from_ Apple. Are things that different in the US?

It's not frequent, but it does happen. For example: http://www.marco.org/2014/12/01/app-store-rule-5-6

Once. In the US. And they got called out by a popular Apple blogger. :-)

Seems to me that someone is holding Apple to very different standards from other companies here. If they're sending any type of spam, I'm either blind or it's so low quantity that I don't even notice.

(Aside: I periodically read your blog; great stuff.)

I think I've seen one or two other instances, but I couldn't tell you what they were. In any case, it's not holding Apple to different standards, merely holding them to the same standards as the rest. That they pretty much all fail doesn't mean this is somehow unjust.

Thanks for the note about my blog!

Every time I upgrade either iOS or Mac OS X to a new major release, I am treated to push notifications or desktop popup notifications advertising both Apple Maps and the Safari browser. I think it's pretty irritating. These notifications make me think less of Apple.

Android push notifications have always been a sacred space and I uninstall apps that violate it, except, Amazon, Pandora, twitter, and airbitz, which provide services I really need.

You can long-press on the notification to block Amazon from sending them again. The Kindle app is great, but its spammy notifications really aren't.

The problem is I want "stuff has arrived" notifications but not "top 10 black Friday deals" notifications.

Anecdata: a few days ago I got a push notification from Google Play Games. Someone was "inviting" me to something.

I don't play games. I don't engage with the "Play" Store for anything other than apps. I don't like notifications or interruptions of any sort.

The experience prompted me to disable as much of the Google Play framework on my Android tablet as possible.

Just sayin'.

Push notifications are the online equivalent of the Home Shopping Network.

Heck, I hated Pointcast with a passion when it came out, what, 20 years ago?

yes

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