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Comment by lobster_johnson | Hacker News Reader

There are so many apps that abuse notifications. I often find that I have to turn a new app's notifications off after installing it.

For example, the Kindle app (on iOS) keeps bugging me about random things that are basically ads for Kindle. The Etsy app does the same. I recently installed the AliExpress app, and it started sending me notifications daily about deals ("Still looking for wigs? Look what we found, just for you!" -- just because I was entertaining myself the other day by browsing through all the crazy crap that AliExpress sells, it now thinks I want a wig).

Apple (and Google, presumably) really should penalize app creators for abusing notifications.

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I find myself clicking terribly targeted ads just to screw the metrics and waste the advertiser's money.

Targeted ads are a joke in 2017.

Notification abuse is honestly worse. It is mostly stupid notifications that were clearly not written by someone with any advertising experience.

Targeted ads are basically homeopathic medicine in a different market:

They take a small group of people with money who don't care about the shit you sell and honestly resent seeing your beef jerky ad when trying to buy a couch, dilute it with a bunch of people who once Googled "beef jerky" to figure out that one brand or make a funny meme so as to neutralize statistical qualities about the cohort you might not like, and pretend it'll do something for your business besides act like a sinkhole for your money.

But I've slowly come to think most business statistics are deeply flawed, but now we're trapped using them because there was an upward slope to the cliff and people are dumb. Even if you point out that their flawed number models caused their businesses to collapse over and over for no reason but poor optimization, most people just hear "made money for a while".

C'est la vie.

Google is a terrible offender too. I'm on the Android Beta channel, and they recently updated my Google Now. Turns out that they decided that every score in a basketball game was worthy of a vibration. Also that that my commute to work was 30 minutes... on a Saturday. And that the weather was 40 degrees. And that I was near a business. Had to go in and turn each of them off individually. None of that was wanted, just show me the passive notification and I'll get to it when I open my drawer. Let me know I CAN turn them on when I open it for the first time, but don't assume I want that.

IIRC the Apple App Store even prohibits these kinds of notifications, but because the store has no button to report apps you can't do anything about it as user :/

pretty much any push notification is an instant uninstall for me

At least Aliexpress has notification settings, you can leave just messages notifications or disable them completely. With Photos there are no refined notification settings.

You can obviously disable all notifications of an app in Android itself but it cripples an app if some of those notifications are actually useful.

The CVS app advertises via notification to me every time I step in or next to CVS. Creeped me out to the point of uninstalling. Now I disable notifications for everything but email and messaging apps.

Notifications are opt-in on iOS, so its not so bad. I have gotten used to just denying permissions the first time I launch an app.

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