A Guide to Push Notifications for Developers | Hacker News Reader

A Guide to Push Notifications for Developers

smashingmagazine.com

88 pointsfagnerbrack18 comments

This guide seems to have reasonable guidelines for developers who want to use push notifications without being annoying, which is creditable; but IMO it's too little, too late.

The preponderance of random sites asking me to allow almost certainly spammy notifications has led to me instinctively disallowing all notification requests, and I will mentally penalize a site for showing me prompts popups about notifications as well.

The only suggestion I might possibly have around this is to explicitly show the user a preview of all the possible types of notifications they might get at the point you ask them to sign up for it. If there are so many that it might get confusing, guess what, you should probably not send them in the first place.

A user will almost never _want_ unsolicited notifications, because they are by definition spam. If you have a radio-button saying "Get notified of new articles" which then enables them, you'd have a lower, but much more genuine following.

> I will mentally penalize a site for showing me prompts popups about notifications as well.

I don't like this either, but the reason it exists is that you can only prompt for actual notifications once, and there's no way to ask again, meaning the incentives are set up to only prompt at the OS level if you know the user will say yes.

Let me add:

* Don't re-enable notifications every time your app updates

* Don't hide the opt-out options or I'll just opt out at the OS level.

* Don't mis-categorize push notifications. If you're receiving Breaking News notifications (but nothing else), suddenly the NYTimes will decide Championship Game is "Breaking News" and spoil a sporting result for you for a sport you've never gotten notifications for before. (because 'sports' is turned off!)

I'm also confused how both iOS and Android opt-in are both 35-40% but Android is default-opt-in.

A variant of your point three:

* Avoid inventing new categories of notifications. When you have to, don’t default the new category to opt-in for users who have opted out of the closest existing one. Two rounds of notification whack-a-mole and your app is getting uninstalled.

I think Linkedin did/does this

I'm glad Android finally lets you block push notifications on a per-app basis. I block all push notifications except for incoming text messages. Why would I want to be interrupted in the middle of dinner for a promotional message??

You can also add OS notifications and browser notifications to the list of things consumers never asked for. I'm sure there is some utility for some people. But for the most part, it's just further attempts to increase "engagement" at the cost of user experience.

As someone who uses web apps in my browser rather than Electron versions of the same application packaged with a slightly outdated Chromium engine: don't take away my notifications.

I'm glad browsers have decided to simply block notifications by default. The constant insistent notification prompts by terrible developers trying to get me to accidentally sign up to their stupid blog news feed annoyed the crap out of me. I already had notifications set to denied by default long before browsers started shipping the policy and I do the same for other permissions.

Notifications are extremely useful for actual web applications. Blogs and news sites should stay the hell away from my notification area.

I am on Android 9. And can block per app basis. Its been a feature for sometime now.

Yes, but newer versions of Android let you block categories of notifications for apps. Things like story post notifications are blocked for my apps while DMs aren't.

Notification channels were introduced in Android 8.0 over five years ago. You don't need a newer version of Android, any supported version should do!

For a long time after their introduction, apps were still written for the old notification system, so many users probably missed the fact they could theoretically mute or block certain categories. When apps started targeting Android 8, developers had to use the appropriate channels, but I'm pretty sure it took months for most common apps to support this feature properly: many apps had a single category for all notifications even when they used the new notifications API.

Just say No to push notifications!

There is a huge problem with spammy push notifications that trick users into accepting push notifications by using fake media players and fake CAPTHAs that if accepted will push all manner of SPAM on victims devices that say they have multiple viruses that pull up Google play store app to some bogus Cleaner/antivirus apps.

The push notifications are hosted on Cloudfront using AdMaven and AdFly and AppNexxus.

I have been trying to report these criminals for a couple of years now with no luck.

Cloudfront refuses to take down the script that AdMaven uses and AdMaven, AdFly, AppNexxus and Proppelerads all ignore multiple attempts to contact.

If you find these in the wild, your best bet may be to report them to Google's Safe Browsing service (and probably Microsoft's one as well). CloudFront doesn't need to take action if the specific subdomain gets flagged for malicious content. These lists actually have an incentive to block malicious sites, unlike hosters like Cloudfront/AdAnythingReally that want to be involved as little as possible. The more of their domains get reported, the more screwed these hosts are, because at some point their actual business will start to get affected.

You can report malicious websites through Firefox (menu > help) or through this link: https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/... Microsoft's report page can be found here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/support/report-unsafe-s...

Don't make push notifications mandatory. Android OS has mandatory push notifications for things that I absolutely do not care about. Samsung has mandatory push notifications for updating their crapware that I've never opened.

My phone runs Xiaomi's MIUI and after disabling the stupid "RAM cleaner" popup, I don't get any notifications from the system unless it actually matters (i.e. "battery almost empty").

My Samsung tablet though, oh boy. I tolerate Google Drive the notification after setting up a Google account but I don't need Onedrive or Samsung Cloud or whatever the hell Samsung Free is. I can't believe Xiaomi's iOS-knockoff does a better job at curtailing notification spam than Samsung.

I would also like if the users are allowed to choose the notification priority, Especially in communication(chat) apps when they send messages to someone.

e.g. 'Delayed' for a meme, 'Immediate' for urgent/emergency and the receiver would receive only the notifications tagged 'Immediate' as push notification and the ones marked 'Delayed' would be a pull notification.

If this is implemented, Then I think chat etiquette can be forced upon just like email etiquette in professional communication. I've been brain-storming this for a while now[1].

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/59-notification-pollution-mobil...

Push Notifications are becoming like promotional emails. Instead of getting important stuff in the notification drawer, you get nagged multiple times a day to open an app. Of course, turning these off isn't a problem (like unsubscribing) but it's quite annoying.

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