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Comment by sanedigital | Hacker News Reader

Depending on how this is implemented, this could actually be a step in the right direction. Lots of apps already send "promotional" push notifications (including big names like Lyft and Uber). The only way to turn them off was to turn off all notifications, which meant missing actual important updates. If this change means being able to opt-out of one without losing the other, I'm all for it.

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Interestingly I interpret the article as apps were abusing push notifications without a second thought in the past when it was explicitly against the guidelines, I fail to see how they will self moderate now some of it is even allowed.

With the ample data we have so far it most probably will lead to dark UI patterns with dysfunctional opt-outs and/or blanket consents at most if someone takes it seriously at all.

Then these apps would be removed from the app store, I suppose.

Apple's enforcement of the app store rules is sporadic at best, specially the widespread abuse of notifications for marketing.

But perhaps the reason they have been so lax in enforcing that particular rule is because they know they are doing it themselves in their own apps, and didn't want to attract lawsuits?

If so, now that they are introducing this new functionality they might start looking more carefully at notification system abuse.

They don't seem to concerned about lawsuits, considering the advantages their own apps get on the platform.

They seem to enforce the guidelines purely based on politics (whether the publisher has friends at Apple and how important the app is to the ecosystem).

I do wish they'd be legally bound to treat everyone the same way (EU?).

It is wishful thinking. I can recall no case when someone said we should spam less ads or do it in a more respectful manner.

These apps could have been removed long ago, per the guidelines.

It's tricky. Could you imagine if Apple removed Uber from the App Store? Users would be livid. And at Apple, not Uber, I suspect.

Apple just needs to stop Uber from uploading new versions. Users won’t notice a thing, but Uber can’t have new features any more.

I would assume you could control the showing of ad notifications and non ad notifications separately as a user.

That's what I'm assuming.

Not only that, but now Apple is probably going to be very aggressive about kicking apps off the app store if they find even a single notification in the non add stream that they, in their sole estimation, consider to be an ad.

This might be a trap feature. I could easily see it being used to allow apple a reason to get rid of you.

As a user, good! I hate the fact that there are certain apps that to use properly I have to have push notifications on or it severely restricts the functionality of the app (uber eats for example). Then they send promotional ads to me which I can’t turn off which is really annoying.

I’m excited for Apple to enforce this policy. Yet another example of Apple being pro user.

Why should Apple be the police, they don’t even currently police their apps in a uniform way. So many apps violate the guidelines but are still in the AppStore.

I welcome the change but I’ve also seen Apple be a bully.

> Why should Apple be the police, they don’t even currently police their apps in a uniform way.

This argument could be used for any decision that Apple makes regarding the AppStore. While I dislike some of the policy decisions being made in the AppStore, I don't see any downsides with this specific case. Developers just have to clearly label promotional notifications going forward, no harm done. Users will be much better off with more fine grained control over what kind of notifications they receive. What's the big deal here?

This seems to work pretty well even when not enforced on Android: https://developer.android.com/training/notify-user/channels

There are some bad apps which will abuse it and use only one category for the important things and ads. But mostly - it's ok. Enforcing a channel for ads would be even better.

Yeah this works really well on Android, I'm surprised Apple hasn't taken a similar approach.

You don't want ads from Uber but still want a push when your ride arrives? Just block the ads channel in settings.

As you said I'm sure there's some bad apps out there that only have one channel, but I haven't noticed any. The big apps seem to support this quite well.

Don't enforce things if on average they already work. You don't know the second order effects. Currently developers have to balance spamminess versus people opting out completely, which probably diminishes future use of the app. That's a nice informal balance. Formalizing it may lead to much more spamminess since hey, you can always opt out.

You can keep the "ride is here" notifications in Lyft but turn the ads off by going to:

Menu > Settings > Privacy > Notifications Preferences > Discounts and News : Off

For Uber, it's similar: Menu > Settings > Privacy > Notifications > Discounts and News > Off

A built-in/centralized way in iOS to accomplish this (that's more discoverable) would be much better.

> A built-in/centralized way in iOS to accomplish this

That would rely on the senders tagging the pushes correctly, as "ad" vs. "not-ad", which would ultimately fall back to App Store review enforcement anyways.

I kind of like the all or nothing approach as far as "annoy me and I'll uninstall your app" goes.

Now the potential loss for the app maker for being annoying is far lower.

This assumes that there are competitors who don’t spam you. For taxi apps, you have no choice since all entrants do this.

If Runtastics reminders to start exercising again also fall under this category, I'm all for it.

Funny I have had the opposite complaint of not getting any more reminders after the 1st month... since roughly 2 years.. and across different Android devices. They even have a setting for reminders and what time they should occur. I reported the bug multiple times and left reviews but the problem remains. I ended up resorting to cluttering up my Google Calendar with daily reminders.

Probably also adjusts delivery priority and improves battery life.

Apple’s APIs are really good about exposing specific use-cases as separate functions and enums.

I don’t understand why this would make any difference regarding their ability to abuse push notifications for ads.

This level of granularity would be great for the contacts permission.

I don’t let any app get my contacts or my phone number anymore. They are too greedy with mine and others now.

If I could choose a subset of my social graph based on context I would.

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