Notifications in iOS 12 | Hacker News Reader

Notifications in iOS 12

theverge.com

53 pointsmikece53 comments

My solution for notifications, was disabling all of them, including noises. Keep the little badge icon that you can only see when logged in. Quality of life went up.

I don't disable all of them but I tend to agree that the best approach to notifications is to disable pretty much everything that isn't relatively low volume and/or something you actually want/need to deal with or know about more or less immediately. Social media, news. etc. definitely does not qualify.

It would be nice if there was something more granular, show notifications from your girlfriend.

In messages/phone you can put people in a group that you can set to bypass Do Not Disturb which is almost the same thing as you're asking for. In other apps, I'm not sure how iOS would have the identity information to do what you ask.

Is there some magic to make that work? So far as I can tell, this is only honored for phone calls. I don’t get texts from my wife when my phone is in DND mode, and she is in my allowed group.

It's possible :-) that I'm wrong. I knew the feature existed for phone calls and I assumed that meant it worked for texts as well. But I haven't personally tried it. [ADDED: I could see the thinking being that if it's really urgent, someone will call and, if you're sleeping, a message notification won't reliably wake you up.]

I often run in DND, with some of my contact list set to bypass DND and notifications off for nearly every app.

That combined with notifications set to repeat on messages (like old feature phones used to) means I'll get a few pings from people I'd like to hear from. Everything and everyone else is silence until I decide to unlock and look.

The only thing I miss on iPhone is a notification LED as even with repeat I occasionally miss a message or call from friends. Then again perhaps I don't: in all my years on Android, and paying for several LED apps, I never once got the simple notification behaviour I sought from an LED. Not once. Android always overwrote it with something else, or Google's preferred colour or different behaviour.

My old feature phones and early GSM mobiles managed to do LEDs sanely enough.

I do this too. I found an iPhone on the sidewalk a few months ago. It was locked but I could see notifications. I was absolutely aghast at what people allow to disturb them. This phone had pages and pages of notifications. Countless random apps alerting you of pointless new events occurring. Things going on sale, enticing you to buy things, friends posting things, etc. It was fascinating to see how other people live their lives.

That was the initial reason I disabled them, because I don't want personal messages coming through, or even who is sending them. Now it's a sanity reason. All must go.

The article starts out by saying that Android is much better at notification and that Apple is slowly catching up, however, what you describe is what I want on my Samsung S7 and can't have.

So maybe Apple isn't as bad at notifications as some would say ...

I just discovered that the unread message count badges were a Touchwiz only feature that went away with the Oreo update on my S7. The default Android Oreo way (which is now the only way) is awful; the count is just the number of undismissed notifications.

It amazes me that iOS has had this from day one, third party Android vendors including Samsung, Sony, and HTC have all created they own solutions, and yet Android made it to the letter "P" still without this feature.

I just upgraded to Oreo this week it remains to be seen just how many emails and messages I'm going to miss now that I can't see whether or not I have anything unread in these applications. It's frustrating.

The current belief is that constantly engaging with our smartphones has damaged our lives. We're unable to focus because we allow constant interruptions and we habitually check our phones instead of being present.

The current trend is to do away with these distractions and allow people to focus.

What you're arguing for is the exact opposite. You're asking for the distraction. Persistent reminders that you are neglecting a particular App.

You have it backwards. A badge on an icon is a passive indicator not a notification! When I look at my phone, I want to see if I have an unread message.

The Oreo model means I either have to have notifications (which are actual distractions) or I simply have no clue if something needs to be dealt with. For a device designed for communication, this is important. It's not a distraction, it's literally the reason I have the device.

While I like badge notification, they can be distracting. I sometimes find myself opening apps just to remove the badge icon.

Don't worry, next year it'll be introduced on Android.

I’ve even disabled badges for most things, including anything social. The badges are too enticing.

Oh see, my solution to that was just removing those apps, and deleting my social accounts.

Are you marco.org ? Because Marco has explained something similar in the podcast.

Very likely they’re. Username seems to be in reference to Marco’s Overcast app.

negative

I recently started taking a new approach. Say yes to any new app that requests notifications. If the app sends me annoying notifications, I delete the whole app.

That was my solution to having a bunch of apps on my phone that I don't use.

Would be nice if there was a long-press option that allowed me to either mute all notifications from an app for a given amount of time or mute all but the app in question for a given amount of time.

They’ve added that in iOS 12.

(Not sure about ‘for an amount of time’, but you can mute or disable from a notification.)

Android's Do Not Disturb settings that respect calendar events have changed my relationship with my phone immensely.

Haven't gotten a whole lot of proactive Siri suggestions yet, but the grouped notifications are really great. Quick replies have gotten a bit odd, though, because now all notifications also support ignoring them as an action so there's more context actions to everything.

I would already be happy with a "Clear all" notifications button on my iPad Pro.

Press and hold on the x on the top right of notifications does not work? (on iPhone it is done via 3d touch)

Idk about the iPad Pro but on iPhones with no 3D Touch there simply is no way to clear all notifications on iOS 11

On my iPad pro, the X button only clears one days worth, so if I ignored them for a few days, I have to clear each day separately. Usually not a big deal since I do it every few days, but sometimes it can add up.

Hopefully at some point they’ll get background safari notification, even at a very low “sampling” rate, e.g. check only once in ten minutes. Until then, there’s no hope for web apps compared to native apps.

I thought this existed, but nope, it's Mac only. Darn.

There will never be hope to web apps compared to native apps.

Allowing websites to harass me about notifications is one of the stupidest standards I’ve seen.

No, I DONT want the latest news from X. If I did I’d use your RSS feed or Twitter or FV or something else.

Those notifications work for normal people, and there're services that will send them for free and with no limits. No wonder lots of sites use them.

Even with grouping (FIANLLY) and granular DnD and priority settings, iOS notifications still seem stuck in the Stone Age compared with Android P.

It really is astonishing that they've gone all these years without copying the best parts of the clearly-more-beloved android notification tray.

It’s a point of constant frustration for me when on call—i actually want three levels of notifications (most notifications show without alert, some vibrate, and pagerduty rings). When awake, i want more notifications to vibrate, but i want all phone calls to ring.

Thankfully the apple watch has addressed this by actually waking me up when i get a call, so i can just turn vibrate + Do Not Disturb on, but it’s so confusing how they market their mobile devices as being for professionals when their notifications settings feel like they haven’t been updated since they were introduced. The resulting notification system (especially Do Not Disturb and the vibrate physical switch) feels like a toy.

I get what you're saying but you're describing how user interfaces can get really complex and unusable. So, now, for an edge case that the vast majority of people have no need for, you would now have 4 levels of notification, with possibly different behaviors depending upon whether Do Not Disturb is on or not. Whereas many of us were already pretty much fine with turning off most notifications and using DND when appropriate for the others.

> pagerduty rings

iOS has the option to whitelist DnD phone calls. I have Pager Duty on it, my boss, as well as a few trusted colleagues that know to only call if something _needs_ my immediate attention. In addition my family knows that my phone will always ring if you call me twice in a row, and that they can always do this if they need me.

There are times when I do not want to pick up a phone calls. We use to just be able to pretend to not be at home, or to actually leave home to not receive calls. I want DnD to filter out the calls that I would previously screen with an answering machine when avoiding people.

How do you set DND to apply on the phone only?

Regardless, it’s frustrating Apple prioritizes a simple interface over usage. Not terribly surprising for a phone, but again, it’s much less a useful tool for it.

I would guess patents held by Google regarding their notifications interactions are part of it.

Isn't this the only one? https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090249247A1/en

AFAICT, Android never even incorporated the designs in this patent.

It's a pity I still coulnd't testdrive Siri Shortcuts. That app is coming much later apparently.

Supposedly its launch will coincide with the public release of iOS 12. But you can try out a limit set of Siri's new features in Settings > Siri & Search.

You can see a fairly large subset of what Siri Shortcuts appears to be by checking out the (now free) Workflow app: https://www.workflow.is

Apple bought it last spring, and based on the imagery from the WWDC keynote on Siri Shortcuts, SS is the same Workflow app with deeper system integration.

I have it actually and I like it. But I was looking forward to all the system integrated functions. They're partially there like I can create a workflow from the visited websites in Settings but it's not editable without the Shortcuts app.

This is a really funny one. I opened The Verge and got the usual GDPR popup, I followed (pretty well hidden) links to the form where you can set your ad preferences and guess what they told me:

You are using Safari which blocks third party tracking cookies. You have to enable third party tracking cookies to be able to disable our tracking cookies.

No shit, Verge. No I won't. I'd rather not read the article.

Say, anyone can recommend a good Safari extension that blocks all the tracking stuff? I don't mean only ad blocking here... all the ad network data that isn't visible as an annoying video or so.

https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari -> uBlock Origin for Safari. It's quite good.

I would love something also for Safari and Chrome that just removed all the 'we value your privacy, press some button' popup that so many sites now have.

New notifications are nice, but I would honestly prefer no new features and instead focus on bugs and performance.

I don't know if you missed it...but that is the focus of iOS 12. Performance is improved even on older devices and all devices that can install iOS 11 can install 12.

There are barely any new features other than some small quality of life improvements, like these changes to notifications.

Yes, I missed it indeed, that's great news! I wish I had asked for a million dollars in my post :D

Reply on news.ycombinator.com