Notifications are highly reliable, except when device manufacturers interfere | Hacker News Reader

Notifications are highly reliable, except when device manufacturers interfere

onesignal.com

29 pointsgdeglin28 comments

Manufacturers, please keep interfering with notifications.

Better yet, let's get google in on the business and do it by default in a standardized fashion on every android device. Spam is bad enough sitting idly in my message center. I don't want my phone to fill up with battery-guzzling nagware unless I very explicitly enable it. An acceptable compromise would be to enable notifications by default but put a permanent disable option on each and every message so that users could punish apps on the first abuse.

Spam is a concern yes, but not telling the user why the new whatever widget they just installed doesn't notify them when the thing is ready is a pretty bad design over site.

It should just be a front facing user option.

They shouldn't be hiding QOL settings.

Android O redesigned the way notifications are presented to users and should do a good job addressing notification overload. The interface prioritizes ongoing notifications (like driving directions) and user-user messages, and throws a lot of the low quality ones in an 'FYI' section that's almost hidden. There's a lot more configurability as well, so you can turn off certain types of messages from apps, but get other more important ones.

> An acceptable compromise would be to enable notifications by default but put a permanent disable option on each and every message so that users could punish apps on the first abuse.

This is exactly how recent android works (at least, it does on my Nexus 5X). On any notification, you can slide it sideways to access a settings menu where you can immediately block all notifications from that app forever.

In fact, this has been a thing since Android 4.1, released in 2012. Newer versions have more granular controls than just all or nothing.

> I don't want my phone to fill up with battery-guzzling nagware

...Then don't? You control what you install.

Unless it is manufacturer-installed.

You should be able to install an app at without allowing it to do anything in the background whatsoever.

Even better would be if Android were to stop popping up its own stupid notifications. Since getting a new Android 6 phone (stock Moto G4 Play), I've seen:

• regular pop-ups explaining how to do basic things with my phone like swipe (thanks Google, I already know all of this, please get out of my way, I am busy);

• pop-ups in Google Maps trying to tell me where to eat (no Google, I do not want your paid recommendations that cover half the screen); and

• audio pop-ups (!) telling me how to do hands-free chat while I'm playing music through a loudspeaker (seriously… WTF??)

None of which I have been able to figure out how to disable.

These notifications make the interface seem unreliable, childish, and unrefined. Is there not someone at Google – like Jobs – who has the authority and charge to identify and stamp out these user-hostile behaviors, and the flawed internal processes that reward managers/developers who implement them?

On stock Android 5 I can long-hold any notification which will display info about the app, then click info button and check disable notifications for this app. Isn't this default?

So it seems like most Android manufacturers are independently adding their own aggressive power savings mode which kills apps - and prevents any background tasks or notifications - just about as soon as they're out of the foreground. And users have no idea this is the case when they buy the phone.

Seems like Google should just create a better power management system - or one that selectively lets through notifications without firing up the whole app - rather than have the manufacturers bungle this up.

Oh be honest, the manufacturers will just find something else to bungle up.

They can't just leave the software alone, they all have to add mindbogglingly worthless cruft for no reason that makes sense.

9 out of 10 times it's the carrier and not the manufacturer. I always ran "worldwide" roms and the difference is stark.

It's the manufacturer, the same stuff happens when you buy off the shelf. PC manufacturers don't have carriers and look at all the crapware they build.

The upcoming Android O update introduces standard limits on background tasks very much like these manufacturer "optimizations":

https://developer.android.com/preview/features/background.ht...

The difference is that these limits have defined guarantees for developers: cloud push notifications can still wake up an app, apps can schedule periodic jobs to be batch executed and background services can stay alive using an ongoing notification when necessary. Right now, some distributions like MIUI will cripple your app entirely unless the user disables "battery optimization" for it, no matter what you do.

If phone apps followed a proper runtime lifecycle -- start, use, terminate -- and phones had proper task management this would be visible front-and-center and wouldn't be an issue.

And I don't share this author's view on notifications... most of the messaging delivered to me via notifications is neither urgent nor time-sensitive. Notifications are a nuisance

I disable most notifications. Basically everything besides sms and e-mail (and only for some accounts that tend to get 2-3 messages a day). The ones that remain activated tend to be reasonably urgent, and the apps that receive them are the ones that I'd like to start as soon as the phone boots and keep permanently in memory. Or at least, I'd like my remaining notifications to be able to wake up the apps they belong to.

Me too, yet theres always more to block. Especially on Android.

And if you do block notifications? Some apps needle you about it relentlessly!

The entire purpose of notifications is to bring urgent and/or time-sensitive things to your attention. If you're getting notifications you don't want, it's on you to turn them off.

Totally. I agree 100%. App makers have a financial incentive to make their apps as addictive and engaging as possible. Notifications are a key tool. The above article is basically nakedly advancing their own financial agenda, but it's for the greater good. Remove the structural impediment to maximum addictiveness. Let the users fend for themselves! Who cares that their battery life will suffer even if they opt out of a given app. That's the penalty we all must pay to live in a notification poppin' utopia not unlike the most acclaimed episodes of star trek.

Background beacon services or location services also suffer from this although I'm not always sure whether it is the OS author or the manufacturer.

The trick here is that these manufacturers know that people will try a different phone if they believe that one brand or another's battery won't last very long. (Ironically they probably all buy batteries from Samsung)

It drives me mad since our company provides software and hardware that does beacon and geofencing related tasks but the flip side is that I also know that when my Samsung battery is half that of my Wife's phone even though its 2 years newer, I'm definitely starting to think to myself 'maybe I should switch to an iPhone'. I think the real issue here is probably people wanting to do more than batteries really permit at the moment and its a frustrating tug of war.

The obvious answer in my mind is to give users the power to choose what they want. Its fine for manufacturers to choose defaults that will work for non power users.

Funny. The first thing I do (if it's an option) is disable notifications. I don't like my phone constantly interrupting me. I check for messages and email at my convenience, not the phone's.

And i have my notification going to my watch so I always know what's going on.

People have different uses for their technology.

I also tech everybody how to disable notifications.

It's not even that I don't want interruptions. I don't want notifications from app X, so that I can be interrupted by relevant ones.

I just got a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 a while back, a lot of phone for not a lot of money. Anyway, it comes with MIUI, a stupid version of Android, and notifications was very rare with the default settings. You have to enable notifications per app, and then there was some sort of aggressive killing of background apps, so you wouldn't get any notification from many apps anyway since they weren't alive to send them.

All of these battery saving options are great, when they are painless. Running apps that _need_ to stay in the background like Tasker is a much more painful experience now than it was a few years ago.

> It's now only a matter of time before app-to-user SMS goes away entirely.

Was this ever a thing? The only SMS messages from "apps" I ever get are for 2FA codes.

Maybe it's regional? I know sending SMS to US numbers is a lot cheaper than, for example, Dutch numbers.

The high cost of SMS in some countries is a big factor, but there are other reasons that many publishers have largely moved off of SMS to push whenever possible:

1. SMS Aggregator+Carrier integrations can be buggy, especially when optimizing for low cost aggregators.

2. Carriers often have filters in place that can block content without the publisher being notified. Unsurprisingly, SMSs that contain URLs frequently get blocked by these filters.

3. Carriers have inconsistent standards when it comes to content, encoding, and even length of SMS messages.

4. It's easy for publishers to track the deliverability and CTR of notifications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com