Apple News has a notification spam problem | Hacker News Reader

Apple News has a notification spam problem

matthewcassinelli.com

96 pointsatrain71465 comments

Is this really an app you want to leave notifications on for, period? It feels like the kind of thing where you just say "okay now is time to Read Some News" and go see what's new.

YMMV, I have generally turned off notifications for everything.

Agreed. I’ve turned off Facebook notifications years ago after they were spamming the heck out of me. A friend of a friend added a photo wow Facebook. It just became too much. Now I log onto Facebook a few times a month to usually about 30-40 notifications I often click once to clear but often don’t read through them. They are so desperate to have us engage with the screen.

They started texting me that I had notifications. I'm pretty sure I provided my phone for 2FA, or they just scraped it off my phone when I had the app installed (mistake). This was also shortly after they had one day shown me some kind of dashboard where I could see the various engagements with content I posted. It just stunk of sadness and desperation. I closed my account after that.

I agree. Up until very recent, most news was consumed later in the evening or the day after it happened. The current landscape is filled with a constant stream of events that have no immediate impact on my life other than distracting me from more important tasks.

There were many years where I might have caught the evening news and subscribed to a weekly news magazine that would catch me up on anything especially notable that happened during the week. I'd probably learn about major news events by seeing a newspaper headline or the radio at some point. TBH even most "breaking news" doesn't have a lot of direct effect on my life.

In an ideal world, you might want to get notifications once or twice a year for major events. And daily or weekly digests for the rest.

Ideally I’d like to subscribe to a curated actually “breaking news” feed that doesn’t spam me. Terrorist attack? Yes please. Plane crashed? Yes please. Rumors of Megan/Harry moving to Africa? Who the fuck cares?

Who the fuck cares?

Sadly, probably more people than care about the other stuff. At least if my News feed says anything about society. I have to actively block/dislike anything celebrity related or it clogs my feed.

As for notifications, with easy access to news through HN, Apple News, online newspapers, and social media feeds, I don't feel like I need notifications for much.

Right now, my phone is limited to texts, calls, meeting reminders, and the security system at my house. None from social media, none from news, email is off, etc.

I feel like anything interesting about a plane crash will eventually end up here, no need to interrupt my life over that.

> Rumors of Megan/Harry moving to Africa? Who the fuck cares?

"Top videos" and "Trending Stories" in my view suggest I'm definitely an outlier (as are you, by the sounds of things), as it's always full of items like that which you've mentioned you have no interest in.

You probably either need to suck it up, or pay for a service that caters to your (our?) needs. I've opted to suck it up.

Welp, for some people it's "Who the fuck cares?" about the former 2 categories as well. It'd be great to have notification settings separated by categories, but I imagine it being dificult, having so many different news vendors (then again, if anyone can do it it's Apple).

WSJ gives notifications for actually important things.

Agreed I got fed up with the notifications and turned them off after a week.

Apps with notification permission on my phone: Uber, Apple Pay.

i've had to disable uber because they spam you with "offers".

You actually can't turn off notifications for it.

I've done it—and on a day when you get something like the Mueller report or the Notre Dame fire—my phone will buzz. :/

Yes you can. I have never gotten any notifications. You may have not done it properly. I’ve never opened the news app. I just have had notifications off in settings.

#anecdata: I have notifications turned off for News and I've never had a single one.

I turn it off and every so often Apple decides that no, I want their dumb news notifications again. Then it goes off again. I have never received an Apple News notification that was not dumb, stupid, and useless. It's sort of like airport CNN except in your pocket that randomly turns itself on after you have opted out of it.

I would be filling a bug report over at http://bugreporter.apple.com

Definitely not normal for the OS to be ignoring notification settings.

Apple is not above sleazy tricks like this. They have also had ‘bugs’ where they silently turned off the ‘Limit ad tracking’ setting automatically.

Also if you're an iTunes Match user and don't subscribe to Apple music you now have to skip past an Apple Music advert every so often when you open the Music app.

Not sure if it's once a month or once an update but I've had it twice so far.

Not to mention having to delay an update notification daily on my Mac. This is the sort of behavior that any other big 4 would be dragged over the coals for.

> Not to mention having to delay an update notification daily on my Mac.

I don't understand this. Windows is "dragged over the coals" for forcing updates at the worst times. Why? Because no one ever updates willingly, the update just gets kicked down the line until finally the system forces it.

You have two options for osx:

* Complain about update notifications and never change your attitude or flow. Continue to gripe on forums instead.

* Understand that updates are generally good, and run the updates in the morning before you start working, or at a more convenient time.

I only push back updates about 2-3 days if I forget, but it's not that hard to just update and get it over with.

Apple could improve this situation a lot if the update didn't take a random 20-40min (and that's on latest and greatest hardware). I'll be the one to tell people to update ASAP normally, but this? There's no way I'm updating if I'm on call, for example. Or may possibly need access in the next hour. In practice they means days of delay.

It's not ignoring so much ass the internal array of notification options changes, or the app is upgraded across a major OS release, or something else which causes a new or replacement notification setting to take on its default value.

The problem, if anything, is that whatever test suite they run doesn't include someone opting out of everything, applying the update, and then checking if they are still opted out of everything (including new stuff that didn't exist before).

This definitely doesn't sound correct. Aside from the fact that the default for notifications is zero permissions, Apple don't keep adding new notification types. I've never seen the type of "reset" you're talking about in 10+ years of developing iOS apps.

If you're certain you've disabled notifications (Settings > News > Notifications > Allow Notifications), then file a bug.

> the default for notifications is zero permissions

Not for Apple's apps. Also, note that as of iOS 12 apps can post "provisional" notifications without asking for permission: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...

The default is most certainly not zero notifications for Apple News. Get a new iPhone, click through the setup procedure, and you'll get lock-screen notifications about news.

The only way I can think of this might appear to happen, other than a bug, is restoring a backup to a point where notifications were still enabled.

No, this consistently happens when Apple does an iOS release that makes major updates to the News app. Update installed, start getting notifications.

It’s a shame Apple have not been as strict about spammy notifications as they have about other aspects of iOS. I realised the other day that I automatically don’t allow notifications for virtually any app, primarily because I expect it’s going to spam me. Some apps would actually be enhanced by notifications but I never allow it.

The default notifications allowed for any app should be only relevant, action-based ones (“you have a new x!”, “time to practice your x!”, “user x remixed your track” etc.) with an extra opt-in for spammy attention grabbing ones of these are really needed.

Usually when an app sends a spam notification, I just delete the entire app.

For many apps getting push notifications would be the only reason that I install them. But if they then go on to send me spam instead of helpful notification, I don't see the point in using their service.

Could you share some examples of apps that you’d install mainly for their push notifications?

A recent example is "willhaben", it's an Austrian classifieds website (like craigslist), and you can use it to message sellers/buyers. It would be useful to get push notifications on my phone when someone replies to my messages, but since they send spam, I deleted the app.

One example I have is Environment Canada’s weather app. It is a laughably poor excuse for an app, so I never open it. but it does send me push notifications as soon as they issue a special weather statement.

Spam notifications are against App Store policy, and yet…

I only allow lock screen notifications (that can wake the device) for communication apps or critical alerts.

Everything else is set to off or to only notify while I’m actively using the device (banners only.)

I also only enable saving in Notification Center for things that I may want to see past notifications for.

This is something I had noticed as well. Its really surprising that Apple would allow this, since they usually care a lot about user experience. And judging by the amount of notifications - I'd be very surprised if there's anyone left who hasn't turned on notifications for the news app.

I wonder why they wouldn't just compile a Morning and Evening digest and send notifications only then (even that would be aggressive in my opinion - but I wouldn't be overwhelmed.)

I really miss the days of RSS and Google Reader.

I still and happily get most of my news from my RSS feed

What RSS reader do you use?

>Its really surprising that Apple would allow this, since they usually care a lot about user experience.

They stopped caring about that long ago. Look at the experience of the Marzipan apps they shipped. Look at the bug rates of their software lately. Look at the experience of their laptop keyboards. Look at the matrix you have to check to figure out which model of Apple Pencil works with which model of iPad. Look at the port and dongle situation with their laptops. Look at the age of the Mac Pro they're selling for full price.

I had this problem but then I spent 7 seconds turning off Notifications for News.

There is a really, really good article from NiemanLab interviewing the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) about their use of Apple News notifications. This notification spam is exactly what they/publishers want. The Apple News notifications are used to A/B test what gets clicks against all their competitors running the same story, and they use that Apple News notification clickthru data to tweak which headlines & notifications they send via their own app and on their own website - the platforms they really want you to use.

Stat from the article: nearly 5% of the Australian population have opted in to the ABC's Apple News push notifications.

Australia’s Public Broadcaster Is Using Apple News Push Alerts To Reach New, Younger Audiences

http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/australias-public-broadcast...

The full article is really worth the read - especially the part about the notifications the ABC were going to send to target female runners at sunset.

This is an article in search of a problem.

It takes 5 seconds to disable ALL notifications from this (or any other) app.

The problem is that this is the default behavior of Apple News and is poor design. It doesn't even align with Apple's own Human Interface Guidelines[0], which states "If you send multiple notifications for the same thing, you fill up Notification Center, and users may turn off notifications from your app."

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

But it isn't notifications for the same thing. They are different articles.

> The problem is that this is the default behavior of Apple News

This is not the default behaviour. No application has permission to send you notifications unless you enable it.

That's not true for Apple's own apps. News can send notifications without you enabling them (like you have to for 3rd party apps). I've even submitted a bug report about this and it was closed as "working as intended".

I believe this is true, the difference for News is you get asked if you want updates during phone setup and it's easy to forget you agreed. Since that method doesn't use the usual notifications UI it doesn't cognitively associate as the same thing, which is a little sneaky, but you do still have to give positive approval.

This is a problem even without Apple News+.

When Apple News came out I really liked the idea of having a single place to get pushed real breaking news as they happened. But sadly Apple News (and News+) is not that. Some of it is on the publishers and media (ie everything is considered "breaking" these days) but I think Apple is also part of the problem by pushing out stories on their official[1] breaking news channels that are not in fact really breaking news or news at all. I'm not talking about the biases either, but it has pushed me notifications about active shootings (good) and sports (bad) using the same breaking news headlines.

[1] one of the confusion is probably what is and isn't an official channel. If i can't figure out if the channel is a hand curated one vs one generated by a faulty AI then that's a problem.

From just a few days ago: https://twitter.com/bradleybuda/status/1119022752092921857

I encountered this problem very recently as well. I like receiving notifications for Breaking News but I don't need notifications for lifestyle suggestions. Unfortunately there is no classifier for this in the News App. My workaround was to go into the settings for News and turn off notifications for every media outlet other than the New York Times. It's definitely not fool-proof but keeps more sane.

There however seems to be no way to automatically get rid of notifications on my iPad once I have read them on my phone...

I don’t seem to be having the same problem as others.

I get the odd notification, but they’re rare. I have notifications left on for the app on my phone and work and home computers all.

Seems inconsistent somehow?

Apple's services products are noticeably spammy and it bothers me. News's alerts is one, but others in this category include Apple Music's trial offer notifications and iCloud's badges to upgrade your storage plan. Honestly, these all feel like they're in poor taste (I'd bring up the Human Interface Guidelines, but they don't really apply in this case) and I think they annoy people and might cause more harm than good.

I turned off notifications for the News app a long time ago, so I never noticed this problem.

The author just read ‘Digital Minimalism’ which is a good book so far (I am almost half way through reading it). Like the author, from reading this book I have been very mindful of use time on digital devices.

Some people have turned off all notifications without reading any book ;)

Incidentally, I know this is iOS, but the OS X of old was very good at not letting any background stuff disturb your work. These days we have notifications even on the desktop and apps that steal the focus just because they displayed a dialog. Not even Apple is what they used to be.

I wonder if there is any value for Apple to make an RSS reader comparable to what Google Reader was, and have some way for readers to pay or donate to the publications they subscribe to?

This is a problem - I was getting 10-30 notifications a day - I've just switched off notifications for this app.

It's a shame, as I'd like to be notified if some proper breaking news of significance actually happens. One of my notifications for instance was on Princess Eugenie's 29th birthday.

I have zero interest in lifestyle stories, let alone those of the royalty - it is utter spam.

Yeah, the way to go is with a feed reader, so you can set up filters. Takes a while, but nothing is better than having your own personalized news feed.

I stopped looking at notifications now

That notification screen is a sight for sore eyes.

I like how this negative publicity reminded me of Apple News and now I’m thinking of trying it out!

There is no bad PR, huh

Heh, my comment doesn’t working out that well for me.

I dislike Apple news purely because when my iOS device updated, the icon was added to my home screen, and within one tap I was presented with a tragic new story. I felt this was a step too far as I carefully choose when to consume news and Apple shouldn't have made that decision for me.

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