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Comment by ryanianian | Hacker News Reader

Food delivery apps seem to immediately abuse any form of push notifications in order to send spam. Lyft uses the same push stream for both driver ETA and 10% off coupons. They are indeed more reliable than SMS, yet I turn them off almost as fast as apps start to use them.

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> Food delivery apps seem to immediately abuse any form of push notifications in order to send spam.

Oh, definitely. But if they do (and don't at least give me a way to immediately opt out of that) the app is gone from my phone – and they have no other way of reaching me. Beats the absolute nightmare that is SMS notifications and spam, in my view.

Android provides hooks to filter notifications from apps, while iOS does not, making the notification experience far worse. Allowing web push lets you filter notifications in a browser extension instead.

How do you mean? I can silence or block notifications completely from apps on iOS, and they cannot even send notifications before I approve them to do so.

Are you saying that Android has third party filters that surveil all your notifications in the name of blocking ones you might not want to see?

Yes, Android has a notifications API that lets you process all notifications. (This is in addition to the channels mentioned in the sibling comment.) This is not possible on iOS, except maybe for web notifications with a browser extension. I find that situation untenable for any power user of productivity apps, akin to using email without filter rules.

I'm an android only user, and I think what GP is referring to is that apps can categorise their notifications. In your food example, an app might have categories for "delivery updates" versus "special offers", and you can go into the notification settings for any app and turn on or off categories.

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