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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

Throwing a "This app wants to send you notifications" dialog as soon as you launch an app for the first time, should be banned.

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That would be pointless and regressive.

There are a lot of apps that are basically made of notifications. When I install Signal I want it to immediately ask me if sending notifications is ok so that I can say yes.

Conversely, I find it really useful to block any notification from the get go.

Notifications are blocked by default.

No. If they were blocked you could only unblock them in the settings app.

They're only blocked when you don't allow them.

If the app doesn't ask, they can't send them. They're opt-in.

Then you have to ban iOS, because it's the system that throws that notification if you run an app that has notifications in its capabilities list.

That’s completely inaccurate, the dialog only shows once the app requests the permission.

The app checks for notifications authorization on every startup, and the system checks it against stored user settings. To establish the user settings initially, the system pops up the dialog the first time you run an app with notification capabilities.

No, that's not the case. The user only gets a prompt if the app requests permissions. The user doesn't get a prompt if all the app does is check for authorisation – the state is returned to the app as UNAuthorizationStatus.notDetermined without showing a prompt.

If an app prompts the user for permission to send notifications as soon as it starts up, then it's the app's fault. It's been known to be bad practice (and counter-productive) for many years.

Saner apps defer the notification prompt till later, even if it's during onboarding after showing an explanatory panel first etc.

I do not think this is the case, I had a lot of apps require notifications permission at a separate page with a question asking the user if they would like to receive notifications from this app and pop up the system notification permission dialog after the user taps "I want notifications" button.

At the very least, there should be a system-wide option to decline all new notification prompts.

Interestingly, I run exactly this in one of my apps. A lot of users never actually figure out my app has notifications, but I sleep a lot better at night knowing that I'm not annoying people with prompts.

Why don’t you do it the first time they access a feature related to notifications?

That is indeed exactly when I present the alert: when they enable notifications from settings.

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