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Comment by evanmoran | Hacker News Reader

For the Focus feature, I find it a bit unexpected that someone messaging me can tell if I'm Driving, Sleeping, Coding, or Reading, etc. Does anyone else find this a bit strange/awkward? I know you can turn it off (and I did) within iMessage, but it seems a bit poorly considered. Curious if people like that aspect of the feature!

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I thought it was only letting them know that you were currently unavailable, not the specific Focus type you are currently in.

Ah wonderful. I misunderstood "focus status" to mean the actual name of your focus was displayed, rather the generic "Evan has notifications silenced" message. Thank you for the clarification!

As to what notifications have been helpful: I ended up making Reading and Listening focuses to make personal stuff like reading and podcasting more enjoyable. Then for work I separated out Communicating (email, slack, asana, collaborative docs) from Coding (everything off) as it seemed those had quite different notification needs.

The first time i opened Messages on iOS 15 is prompted me for if I wanted to alert contacts when i'm on do not disturb, and there's an option in settings to toggle it as well.

you can toggle it per contact so I have it on for my wife but no one else.

It will show your contact that you have notifications silenced, not which Focus mode you activated.

It certainly CAN show that though. "Would you like your contacts to know you are driving and unavailable?"

I wonder how many people will use joke statuses. Hopefully they will add an "exclusion list" in the future.

edit: nvm, it just shows a generic status message for all people. it does not display the exact status to that person.

>Pick from a list of suggested Focus options or create your own.

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