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Comment by alickz | Hacker News Reader

>I don't want to miss a notification that my delivery food arrived, but I don't want to be bombarded with daily advertising messages from foodpanda trying to get me to change my behavior.

This is exactly what the Android notification channels allow you to do, and it actually works really well.

For UberEats I have the Delivery notification channel enabled, but the Marketing channel disabled. It's really the best of both worlds. And even more surprisingly it seems most apps support this, instead of putting all notifications under one channel.

I'm surprised Apple hasn't followed suit; NIH syndrome maybe?

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Apple has made changes in the upcoming iOS 15 where apps have to categorize their notifications into categories like “marketing” and functional categories. Users can then use the more granular controls to block notification categories either for all apps or app by app. This can also be mapped into the new Focus modes where users can setup different modes such a “work”, “sleep”, “driving”, etc. Different apps can be allowed or blocked in different focus modes.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/07/apple-refines-ios-15-notif...

https://9to5mac.com/2021/06/09/how-to-use-iphone-focus-mode-...

[added additional external reference]

> Apple has made changes in the upcoming iOS 15 where apps have to categorize their notifications into categories like “marketing” and functional categories.

I don't think that's true. They will introduce 4 different priority levels a notification can have. It's still vastly different from Android's notification channels.

Absolutely this. Android's notification channels are a lifesaver for apps like Snapchat, Instagram, or any of the other social media apps that only serve to suck you in. It makes it super easy to disable all notifications except for DM alerts (which is what I typically do for most apps). It's crazy how many apps actually support it, and it's even crazier that Apple hasn't followed suit yet. Even with iOS 15, Apple's notifications are still a last-gen mess.

Not a replacement, but for anyone who doesn’t know about it: you can configure Instagram notification types even in the iOS app. Surprisingly good system.

Would be great if iOS copied Android and had systemwide channels.

That sounds neat. Does the developer chose which message goes into which category?

I don't recall getting marketing notifications from Uber Eats. What infuriates me are the follow up notifications (paraphrased):

"How was $RESTAURANT_NAME? Please rate and tip!"

"How was $PERSON_NAME's delivery? Please rate and tip!"

"$PERSON_NAME says thanks for the tip!"

I imagine Uber Eats would categorize them under Delivery so you can't opt out of these without opting out of the notifications that are actually useful.

In UberEats (and many other apps) you can configure which push notifications you get. Is that functionally different than channels for the purposes of turning off marketing notifications? Both seem to rely on the App developer allowing you to turn off the notifications you don't want.

The problem I have are the apps which don't allow that, which presumably also wouldn't allow to separate them into channels for the same reason they don't let you turn them off.

A difference is that there's a unified UI for disabling channels, and app developers don't have to do anything except annotate each notification with the channel it belongs to and list the channels somewhere in their manifest (IIRC). If you get a notification you don't like, you long long-press it and a menu appears showing you the different notification channels and prompting you to enable or disable them.

I haven't used Android in a while. What stops a developer from not categorizing notifications and effectively saying "oh they're all General notifications, ha ha ha, you can't get the thing you want without all the slop"?

Bad apps do this. Some even create a new channel for each individual notification so you can't possibly block it. Except for a blanket ban which you can always do. So it does depend on the developers goodwill.

Nominally, the Play Store QA process. (As if there was such a thing.)

>Is that functionally different than channels for the purposes of turning off marketing notifications?

I don't think so, it's just built into the OS which I personally prefer.

>The problem I have are the apps which don't allow that, which presumably also wouldn't allow to separate them into channels for the same reason they don't let you turn them off.

I think Apple is in a good position to enforce this though, given how strict their review process can be. They could easily reject apps that didn't use notification channels properly. I'm sure some would find a way to abuse but I think that would be a minority.

As I said I was surprised on Android by how many apps actually used them, despite not being enforced. I can only imagine they would be even better on iOS, which is why I'm so confused as to why Apple hasn't.

>I'm sure some would find a way to abuse but I think that would be a minority.

Like bookface?

> Is that functionally different than channels for the purposes of turning off marketing notifications?

The key feature for me is that, as soon as I get a notification that annoys me, I can long press on the notification and disable that channel or notifications from that app altogether. I don't have to go into the app and dig through a settings menu; it takes me all of 3 seconds to do what I want.

And then there's the Audible app for Android, which puts both ad notifications and their playback control widget into a single "Member notifications" channel, so that you can't disable the ads without losing access to playback controls.

Sounds like Audible believes the benefits outweigh the downsides of abusing their customers

> And even more surprisingly it seems most apps support this, instead of putting all notifications under one channel.

Maybe because developers want to do the Right Thing, and they can implement these notification groups with no effort and without the marketing department noticing it?

Unlikely. Marketing keeps up with its industry. As soon as Gmail introduced the smart inbox thing, their goal was immediately to make sure their messages don’t go to the promotional tab.

> I'm surprised Apple hasn't followed suit; NIH syndrome maybe?

Because this is something apps should have been doing themselves. But I guess Android will prove (or has proven, at least to me) that it's necessary to enforce this.

After all, nothing is stopping apps from providing a single channel, right? It all comes down to providing developers with a basic framework, making it easier to do the right thing.

I've had apps which group all their advertising notifications under useful channels so that you can't disable their advertising without losing functionality. I've had apps create completely new channels out of nowhere in order to bypass my settings.

Looks like a nice feature to have Android 8.0+ for [1]. Just learned about that because my older /e/ [2] phone is based on 7.1.2.

[1] https://developer.android.com/training/notify-user/channels

[2] https://e.foundation/

Wait, so iOS doesn't let you fine tune your notifications? I don't know how I could deal with my phone unless I could turn off, or turn down notifications.

In iOS one can turn on/off notifications per app at the OS level. Some apps have fine grain control for types of notifications, but this type of fine grain control does not exist at the OS level.

Apple is adding a lot more fine grain control in iOS 15

https://9to5mac.com/2021/06/09/how-to-use-iphone-focus-mode-...

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