Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

It amazes me that neither iOS nor Android have an option for "Disallow all notifications from all apps" or "Opt out of notifications when installing apps". Every app I install immediately starts blasting me with notifications, and I have to go in and turn it off for that specific app. It makes no sense.

My phone should be allowed to make noise if and only if a phone call is coming in from somebody I know. I don't mind if it shows a count of email messages on the lock screen, so long as it doesn't attempt to distract me from what I'm doing to point them out. And that's it. No other notifications of any form.

I see people with things like Slack and IM binging away at them all day long, and I just can't fathom how they get anything done. It just needs turning off.

View on HN

Why even allow phone calls to interrupt you? I am serious: the world is a much more relaxing place when the only moments something can interrupt you are the ones where you purposely decide "this is a good moment" and look at your phone to see if anything happened. I have been operating without audible or tactile notifications of any form now for years. The only time my phone makes noise is when I have an alarm set to wake me up in the morning.

I'm with you. Living in a stone house in the countryside takes care of this for the most part. But realistically most everybody I know has switched to email or other forms of getting in touch, so phone calls rarely happen out of the blue. Even my parents know to email first to set up a time to call.

It seems that the social norm has shifted to the point where an unscheduled phone call is actually considered a bit rude.

> It seems that the social norm has shifted to the point where an unscheduled phone call is actually considered a bit rude.

I really wish that was the case but my observation is that only really applies with people over a certain threshold, much the same way that that people my age (36) remember growing up in a house where noone used the phone after 9pm since it was considered the absolute height of bad manners to ring someone for anything less than "someone died/the nukes are falling".

These days I just put my phone in airplane mode and ignore the thing most of the time.

Personally, I treat phone calls as important. So that, and text messages, are two notifications I don't disable. If e.g. my family needs to reach me about something ASAP, they know they can use this path.

That said, I tend to teach everyone around me that phone calls are for important stuff. That is, I simply don't pick up if I don't feel like it, unless I'm suspecting the call may be about something very important. I'm tired of people thinking I'm available 24/7 for random irrelevant stuff. I don't have much guilt about not picking up, because if something is really important, the caller can always tell me so via text message, and then I'll usually call back.

Do Not Disturb mode on iOS allows for favorites to break through, or multiple calls from the same number in a 3 minute window.

Phone calls are important if and only if you can determine who it is who can activate the ringer.

I'm sorry, but "Dave from Microsoft Support", or "Carol from Card Services", or the misdialed number in some language whose geographical locus is at the antipodes, Isn't. Fucking. Important.

Yes, if you've got a family, wife, children, parents, boss, best friends, whitelist them. Is that really more than a dozen, tops, two dozen sources?

Every. Fucking. Thing. Else. Can. Wait.

Most of it can die in a fire.

The telephone as it exists (POTS/Wired, mobile) is an absolute abomination.

Almost the only people who have my phone number (ie. not Google Voice) are my parents.

If they're calling me, it's usually for a good and urgent reason.

Also, PagerDuty is set up to call me. If a site I'm responsible or is down, that's something I want to know immediately.

In the case of PagerDuty, my exceptionally strong preference is for a physical pager, which is passed, fully charged, to the next person on call.

If the person passing off the pager hasn't charged it, they hold the pager until it is.

Why?

Because if I don't have the pager, I know I don't have shit to worry about. I swear to the gods, that literally nearly killed me. The psychological pressure, over years, of being on-call or 2nd on call (small teams suck) bears down. The moreso with technical debt, buggy sites, and verbal lore recovery methods (trust me, I document the motherloving hell out of everything, but there are bits that are buried very, very deep).

If you're contracting services or running your own sites, a separate pager still offers benefits. Again, it can be handed off, and you know when it goes off there's trouble (yes, you can also program different ring/dial tones, etc.). I'm also impressed by the robustness, range, and battery life of physical pagers, another benefit.

Good for you.

I despise the idea of carrying around an additional device.

I always assume that if somebody calls me out of the blue it means that somebody has died or that my flat has burned down.

I wholeheartedly agree with this.

I'd like a more customizable Do Not Disturb feature, which would let you put people in groups that have different rules. For instance, when I'm working, I'd like to filter out any calls from everyone but colleagues, and even then I'd like my phone to ignore calls from anyone but my immediate team unless they call several times within a couple of minutes. (Except when I'm support, the opposite would be true.)

When I'm not working, I'd like to ignore pretty much any call which is not from people designated as friends, and at night only allow calls from very close friends and immediate family.

Very, very rarely do I get a useful call from an unknown number. In the past year, it's probably happened maybe four or five times, and all other times it's been telemarketers or otherwise useless calls that can go straight to voice mail.

Speaking of voice mail, the visual voice mail feature that was touted as revolutionary in the original iPhone announcement is something I still want. I've never seen it outside of the states, and even then, only on Verizon or whatever it was. I haven't seen it in years though -- is it still available?

iOS does this, too. When DND is enabled, you can separately allow calls from everyone or only your favorites (the default is no one). Further, you can specifically allow "repeated calls" to be allowed through (defined as the same person calling within three minutes)

I know, what I mean though is I'd like the ability to specify different options for different groups – favorites and everyone else isn't enough. Also, DND is really useful to limit people calling at night, but my days are divided more than just day and night – there's work time, play time, family time etc. There are also holidays and other times where different rules would certainly apply. It quickly becomes complex I'm sure (such as, what happens when a contact belongs to multiple groups and there are conflicting rules – which one wins?) but I feel this is an area where there's ample room to innovate. DND is good, but can be better.

There's always custom ringer tones - no reason "silence" can't be the default ringer. Custom vibrate patterns too. :)

>Why even allow phone calls to interrupt you?

Because you're working in a dynamic organization and people need to communicate with you on an immediate, real-time basis, perhaps?

Lots of businesses still operate this way, and lots of people operate this way. Its not always unproductive.

You clearly have neither a spouse nor a child. Or if you do, I can't imagine how your relationship with them works.

You can do it on Android: set your notifications to Priority only (you'll get a little star in the top bar), then configure Priority notifications to include calls, otherwise the phone won't ring. Now all notifications are silent.

That's the only sane way to use a smartphone. People call me crazy (what if you miss something important?!), but to me crazy is allowing to be interrupted every time you get an email, somebody sends you a message, the stupid game sends you another useless notification, etc.

If it's urgent, people call me. Otherwise I want to conserve my very limited focus.

EDIT: I also hate phone calls, so I tell my family, "if I'm busy I might ignore your call. If it's a matter of life and death, call my twice." YMMV, I've often called back anxiously after receiving 7 phone calls from a relative, and it wasn't anything important.

Some apps don't use the builtin notification system on Android. I get sound notification from Line (a big square pop-up that blocks any current activity!) and my friend get quite noisy notifications from some of her game apps even when the phone is set to silent.

Those apps get uninstalled.

> I see people with things like Slack and IM binging away at them all day long, and I just can't fathom how they get anything done. It just needs turning off.

Truth is they're not getting much done but they feel like they are.

Actually that's an over simplification. With something like Slack people get less of "their own" work done but more of certain types of group activity such knowledge sharing, forming a consensus and decision making.

In other words any kind of activity that requires extended periods (30mins+) of concentrated work will suffer if you're tapped in to Slack or otherwise. That includes things like writing code, creating a presentation, planning a project and similar...

Speak for yourself. I program with a buddy, and we regularly use our instant messaging window as sort of a brain dump. Whenever I need to work out something particularly complex or ambiguous, I'll explain it to my friend in chats and go over the points I'm on the fence about. Often either he'll pipe up and offer suggestions, or the rubber duck debugging method will kick in and I'll figure out something on my own. (Having an audience, even a perceived one that may or may not actually be playing Fallout and not paying one bit of attention at the time, is very beneficial.)

I think the potential for IMs to be distracting is there, but my closest friends all fully understand that I will respond whenever I have a moment, and so will they, so we don't have a sense of urgency with the thing. It's more like an extended conversation with history, so we can come back to it, catch ourselves up by reading what they wrote (sometimes hours inbetween responses) and pick right up where we left off.

Sure, it's not the tool, it's how people use it. Though to be fair, the default, common use case is responding immediately. You have to make a conscious decision to ignore pending messages until the time is right - and more importantly, you need to keep to that decision against pressure from your friends and cow-orkers. If you can do that, then asynchronous communication is a huge win. Personally, I still find e-mail to be my favourite tool, but as with phone calls, I'm constantly teaching people that - unless the request is really important, I'll reply whenever I feel like it, which may not be under 24 hours.

I concur. I've recently forced myself to limit time I allow myself to check and respond to e-mail and Facebook Messenger, as well as HN, to a few short, well-defined blocks during the day. My general ability to get things done skyrocketed.

I feel constant barrage of notifications and distractions simply fragment your time. Like, whether you do that communication in one short block or keep the mail/IM constantly open, you generally accomplish the same amount of "communication" in a day. But the second case is like fragmented heap - it reduces the length of consecutive free memory blocks, making you increasingly unable to allocate larger blocks of continuous memory. Instant reaction to incoming messages does the same with concentration, making it hard to perform tasks that require longer stretches of focused work.

Xiaomi's Android UI has a "mute all notifications from this app" button after you swipe the notification. Apps in China love them some notifications, so this adaptation happened here first!

You have the same feature on stock android as well. The only difference is that you long press instead of swiping.

iOS apps are NOT able to send notifications if you do not allow them to when they prompt for permission. They must prompt for permission before using even local notifications.

Built-in apps are pre-approved, but their notification permission can be revoked.

Aren't push notifications opt-in?

I don't believe push notifications are opt-in, but the vast majority of apps that support it also have a signup / login step to link your phone up with the server doing the pushing.

I'm certain that on both iOS and Android, notifications are turned on by default, and have to be explicitly disabled. Both devices support "Do Not Disturb" modes or similar, which can silence notifications, but to my knowledge they still collect in the drawers by default. I'm very familiar with Android's interface to silence all notifications from an app, as I usually don't care for them. (Twitter's in particular are obnoxious.)

I'm certain the opposite. At least for iOS. I get a pop-up when I open the application for the first time "x would like to send push notifications" with an allow/disallow button pair.

Push notifications are opt-in on iOS. You need a token to be able to send a push notification to somebody, and you can only obtain that through explicit permission granted by a system-provided prompt.

They are most certainly opt-in for everything except built-in apps. And those all allow opt-out.

Depends on your definition of opt-in. The app has to 'sign up' with the push notification service of the plattform to receive push notifications. But most apps do this by default. I guess that in most cases this makes sense. most people who install an instant messaging app want to be notified of new messages.

iOS push notifications require permissions, but I believe that apps can schedule "local notifications" without requiring permission.

eg: A timer app can schedule a notification at a specific time in the future.

Previously the case but UiLocalNotification now requires permission to schedule.

iOS' do not disturb mode works well for me for this use-case. Phone numbers I've added to my favourites list can call me, anyone can call me if they call me twice in a row, and I get no notifications while it's on.

I'd definitely prefer a whitelist. Or hell, Android asks if you want to enable permissions now before using them; why not ask for a notification permission?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com