Very true, but their designers are accomplice to the crime.

I'm generally a nice guy but I harbor uncharacteristically visceral malice toward the a-hole who deemed it appropriate for my Android to let apps or the OS interrupt me by default. If you're that guy and reading this right now I hope you feel ashamed.

I don't need to know my peasants in your game are idle.

I don't care that the Gmail account I set up for alerting is missing a backup email address.

My bank does NOT need me to check that my contact info is the same as it was a year ago.

Even the OS updates can keep for a few days; I'll check for and apply them on my terms.

And that Samsung Experience one which keeps sprouting up like a hydra head every time you kill it can go to hell [0].

Yes, Google has improved tooling and made it easier to snipe out unwanted notifications with precision (and I truly commend them for that), but I'm deeply concerned by the culture of disrespectful interruption that has normalized in the mobile ecosystem. Out of the box on a fresh install there's still way too much superfluous chuff and it takes month being subjected to it and correcting the behavior before I finally have some level of confidence my phone has been housebroken. It's more painful than teaching a puppy not to crap on the carpet.

And it's spreading to other "smart" devices. My Roomba work me up with a chime at 3am last night to tell me it's out of battery after it got stuck somewhere the previous afternoon. (Turns out she "fell off a cliff" in my single-story apartment).

Vendors: You aren't as important as you think. You really aren't.

I wish Google and Apple let me bill publishers for my attention - maybe a fraction of a cent for every notification that's dismissed without interaction. That might finally incentivize them toward more judicial and thoughtful use of the "poke and prod" finger the platforms granted them.

[0] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/201141/how-to-re...