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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

I always relish in uninstalling apps when this happens but I hope they have stats somewhere that show: "oh, we sent this annoying marketing notification and an uninstall happens", and I hope some analyst is finding that pattern in their data and telling people about it. But I have to assume the answer is, 'probably not', given that nothing seems to change.

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There's no uninstall event on iOS, and I believe the same is true of Android, so they won't see it directly. Disabling notifications is more likely to be noticed.

I believe some analytics frameworks used to send a silent push notification every day that made the app hit some endpoint, and becaues silent notifications can't be disabled that allowed them to measure uninstals. Apple may have fixed the security hole that allowed this, or told people to cut it out or they can't update their app anymore since I lasted looked into this though.

Well, you can always leave a review of an app if it does pukes such marketing notification, after you uninstall

I tend to sort apps reviews by worst and look what people don't like about - that gives more information than mindless praising and chaffy purchased reviews.

When this happens I also make a point of leaving an appropriate review, not only as a more reliable method of closing the feedback loop but to provide a warning to other potential victims.

You could always leave a nice honest review on the app store; that lets you be explicit and provides a clear signal.

Apple's push notification API would actually return a status code to the app if the app was uninstalled (that required opt-in from the user, though). They no longer do it, I believe.

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