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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

It is still mental and visual pollution. I switched from Windows to MacOS 2 years ago after being a long Windows holdout and damn, MacOS is nice and the Mx series of CPUs/GPUs are also incredibly fine.

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Apple’s products aren’t perfect at this either, but they’re at least much easier to control. You basically just have to disable notification permission for TV. News is spammy also, but not strictly advertising Apple’s junk, it’s just regular attention spam.

Meanwhile in the App Store guidelines:

> 4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.

Not a great look, and it tells you that Apple is willing to compromise on their principles to make a buck. Here’s hoping your privacy isn’t worth selling out too.

Windows is cramming their tabloid-news-by-MSN into the operating system in multiple places and making it a lot harder to get rid of, so for now macOS is still the better of the two. But I‘m not happy with either of them.

Yea I found android better at preventing ads, when I switched to an iPhone I noted that policy and was relieved that I wouldn't be bothered with ads again; only to find that most apps for retail stores still send me coupons and deals with zero way to turn them off, android has granular notification settings so I could turn "promotions" off but keep "order notifications" on, meanwhile that isn't there on ios and most apps don't have settings for that inside them either.

I will also note that whenever an app would't provide the option to turn off promotions on my android i'd just make buzzkill filter to only allow notifications with the word "order" meanwhile any functionality like that wouldn't be possible on ios, i cant even change the notification noise for most apps!

> Not a great look, and it tells you that Apple is willing to compromise on their principles to make a buck.

I think they're holding a good balance here. For example, I do enjoy an alert from the burger slinger down the road when they put up a sale - but I had the choice between opting in or not.

Meanwhile, on Android you don't have the choice, all you can do is mute notifications from that app in the future (and lose out on important notifications) or remove it entirely.

If TV wanted to send notifications for new things that I have access to, that could be helpful. Like the “New music from artists you follow” that Music does. Sending notifications for things that require you to sign up for a subscription is unsolicited marketing and I’d rather they didn’t spam notifications for that, in accordance with the policies that they make everyone else on their platform follow.

One thing I wish Apple would copy from Android is having apps categorize their different types of notifications and let you turn them on and off individually. And then enforce that in the App Store review. I don’t need Uber to send me Uber Eats offers, but I don’t want to block useful notifications by turning all of them off.

They recently added a “time sensitive” categorization that you can let break through Focus Mode rules, but IMO that’s not granular enough.

https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/notifications...

I agree about the mental and visual pollution.

Pollution is a nice way to put it. I prefer phrases such as 'cognitive assault', 'mental violence' and 'attention rape'. I really hate advertisement in all forms.

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