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Even if you think your app depends on push notifications, your customers don't necessarily want them. I would bet that in 98% of the cases you have in mind, I would be perfectly happy to use the functionality without push notifications. (For example, "all chat". Even if your app is capable of chatting with me, I doubt I actually want it to.)

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Building a chat app without notifications is a good way to get exactly zero users.

They were likely referring to chat apps. Good luck building a messaging or chat app without notifications.

Yes, apps over-use notifications for marketing and engagement metrics just like email has been overused. They’re still remarkably useful for a large swath of other use cases, and downright necessary for many others. If you don’t like them, don’t enable them for a given app. Easy.

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