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Comment by alpacaillama | Hacker News Reader

Also the author never really addresses if the API is needed or not, or if it provides a good experience. If Chrome has it, it is seen as a positive. Personally, i'm very happy that PWAs can't spam me with "You left something in your cart" notifications on iOS.

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So don't allow those notifications. I can easily see the existence of a catch-all deny everything by default as well. Safari on desktop happens to have this feature--showing Apple isn't categorically against its existence, as long as it doesn't help undermine their app store monopoly--will occasionally ask me for notifications and, somehow, I always deny them... maybe I have more willpower than you? Just because you have some personality flaw that prevents you from disabling a feature you don't like shouldn't mean that everyone else in the world needs to do without having that feature ever. In a world where Apple doesn't just make quality judgements on content but also makes legal judgments and even moral judgments--being so anti-porn as to be downright misogynistic with an anti-breastfeeding stance--this is a reasonable feature to exist on the web platform, and no one is forcing you to use it.

The challenge is that the notification acceptance rate is so low on mobile devices that it makes it meaningless to implement such features [1]. Practically, user is most likely to accept notifications from sites that they interact with a lot. Those also happen to be the sites whose app user is willing to install. Thus, the notification feature on web is not something that a lot of users require.

> This is a reasonable feature to exist on the web platform

Not really? [1] indicates that notification prompts actually result in users navigating away from webpages clearly demonstrating that this is a user hostile feature.

[1] https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2019/04/01/reducing-notific...

As pointed out in the linked article, the stats conflate unwelcome/unrequested notification prompts (e.g. Reddit, which pops up the prompt the first time you open the website (or used to anyway)) and cases where the user explicitly requests/opts in to notifications. I feel like the latter is something that proper web apps that don't utilize dark patterns could make very good use of. Consider the 85% acceptance rate for the camera/microphone prompt; few websites request camera/microphone permissions in the same intrusive way as they request notification permissions, hence it's not declined as often.

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