Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

On iOS you won’t get notifications or be able to run anything in the background.

But if you are trying to start a business and the $100 a year you would have to pay to distribute your app will make or break you, you have bigger issues.

View on HN

On iOS you won’t get notifications or be able to run anything in the background.

Ok, but what are the downsides?

As a user notifications are a problem, but as an app developer they absolutely work to drive engagement, which is why so many apps use them. So if you’re trying to run a business that’s a pretty important thing.

> As a user notifications are a problem, but as an app developer...

So do you develop apps but not use them? I can't think of a way the hypocrisy isn't shocking here. "Do unto others" and all that.

I’ve developed software all of my career that I personally have no use for.

I develop software to pay my bills. We are talking about notifications, not killing puppies.

We're not talking about whether or not you are killing puppies -- I don't think you're a sadist. Just "make stuff you would want to use." Or "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Or, if you prefer, "act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."

> Just "make stuff you would want to use."

So I should quit my job developing enterprise software because I don't personally have a use for enterprise software?

You think notifications are universally "a problem"? I find many notifications to be quite useful. Appointment reminders are VERY important to me and not at all a problem.

They probably mean generally a problem. Things like reminders seems like a good use case, but with all the apps trying to increase engagement, it seems necessary to mute notifications to an app right after downloading it.

You don’t need to “mute” them, just don’t approve the notifications permission request. Out of the 100+ apps I have installed, I have zero that annoy me with notifications.

Notification management is the problem. Not notifications themselves.

One part is on the system to provide the right management tools, the other is on the user to tell the system what notifications are important.

> Notification management is the problem. Not notifications themselves.

Notification abuse is the problem. Notifications have been so heavily abused by apps (and increasingly now by websites themselves) that makes the notification system itself look terrible.

Users don’t care about “driving engagement”. If your product’s user experience is important, or if is made with any empathy at all for the user, it won’t be spamming him with notifications purely to juice a startup vanity metric.

Unless I absolutely have to have the app (work or something), I avoid it. Webpage any day. It wont bug me in the middle of the night.

  3AM. Sleeping
  Phone: BING!!!
  Me: *groggy* shit, hope everything is ok...
  Me: *picks up phone*
  Phone: Rayman Adventures has updated!
  Me: *uninstalls Rayman Adventures, angrily goes back to sleep*

That’s an easy one - set Do Not Disturb to start at 10:00 and end at 7AM. It will still allow messages through for contacts that you specify.

In iOS 12, you can turn off notifications directly from the Notification Center for an app that bugs you.

Not to sound condescending but why would you have your notifications on at night? 10pm-7:30am do not disturb has been a godsend.

Work. Slack, texts, calls (could be anyone in my department whose number I don't know), PagerDuty, the random number PagerDuty call from. More of a pain to whitelist than to just avoid random apps with notification.

You have to specifically allow notifications after you install and launch the app. Just say “no” when it asks you for permission to send you push notifications.

Good luck, it sounds like a nightmare to be on call all the time.

One week out of five (rotation). Our software has to work (and work well) 24/7/365.

Too many applications abuse notifications and background processing anyway. If you need those features, you have to convince of far more value before I'll install a thing.

If you want an iOS app not to “abuse” background processing, there is a setting that will disable the ability on an app by app basis. Of course you have granular control over notifications and how they are presented on a per app basis.

I'd wager you are not a great representation of the market that 99% of apps serve. Apps abuse those features because it works well for their business.

>Apps abuse those features because it works well for their business.

In the short-run anyway...

This is true.

I allow certain apps to use notifications because there are things that I want to be notified about. My card balance from the Starbucks app, or breaking news from the New York Times app.

Both of those companies started abusing notifications. Their apps are no longer on my phones.

> I'd wager you are not a great representation of the market that 99% of apps serve

I'd wager no one is. Snapchat has 200 million users. There's some 4 billion people on the internet. Niches are niches, and no one serves everyone.

I wish "no one" was my customer then I could get a $40B IPO serving everyone :)

Using email as a notification service works in this case. The user probably gets a notification for new emails.. at least if they do they chose to. :)

Email delivery has its own set of problems - mostly spam filters.

Even when the email does reach the end user, most people get so many emails it’s easy to get lost in the noise.

Using notifications to bypass spam filters speaks to the quality of the notifications you're sending.

If your e-mail is important, people will find it.

If your e-mail gets lost in the noise, then notification is probably not essential.

Getting caught in spam filters has little to do with whether the email is legitimate - just whether it is seen as a bulk email.

It does have issues when it comes to getting users to do something they don't want to do, but it is more than good enough to communicate with users about something they actively want to do.

I have no interest in the former.

I think the point stands, and the article explicitely says "start with". Apps can come later in lots of cases. A personal example - I was hired to build the MVP Android app for a new greeting card company. 1 year later: It's been done for 6 months, no one's using it, no one wants to use it, everyone's using the web app.

With cordova you can create a thin wrapper that can add those features you need, starting with a PWA and extending.

Service workers allow for push notifications and other background tasks.

iOS doesn’t support push notifications for web pages.

Are Safari push notifications desktop only?

https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi...

Yep, desktop only

https://www.izooto.com/blog/ios-push-notifications-safari

And this might be why....

Web Push Notifications have clearly made difference in every marketing campaign it gets involved in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com