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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

From the product side, the obvious move is to lump user and computer notifications.

On the user side, what are our options?

You are perfectly describing Google's strategy with maps. Lump together traffic updates and "rate this place" (even though I didn't rate the last 100 times), to create as much all around disgust for your brand as possible.

If you have Android Oreo/8.x, most (all?) google apps (including Maps) allow you quite fine grained control over notification categories (so you can choose to have traffic updates and nothing else, if you wish)

Notification categories is not exclusive to google apps, of course (OS level feature as long as your app targets Oreo), but their apps tend to give you very good control over what it shows you.

So, I'd disagree strongly that this is a google "strategy". It's more a problem that their apps tend to have a lot of features crammed in.

Of course, I don't know how this works on iOS (I'd be surprised if it's not in the settings somewhere? It's in their interest that you don't disable all app notifications)

I'm not on Oreo, and they may have changed their tactics. But there was certainly no way to exercise this type of control in maps the last time I looked extensively, which was a few months ago.

Edit: They definitely have, since I have those options now.

> So, I'd disagree strongly that this is a google "strategy". It's more a problem that their apps tend to have a lot of features crammed in.

It doesn't matter much to me if the problematic behavior arises from strategy or accident, though.

Adding the ability to turn this stuff off is good, but it should be default.

Don't use products that do that.

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