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Comment by status200 | Hacker News Reader

I upvoted something this morning and got an immediate "Are you enjoying Reddit?" popup that was a gateway to leave a review, I am curious if that is related.

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Perhaps, tho basically every app does that now (should be against policies IMO). At worst they tweaked the frequency flag

I thought this was disallowed nowadays, but I've been seeing it a lot from a lot of random different apps..

For a while, you'd get these "Enjoying app?" popups where yes -> "Post a review!" and no -> "Wad up your feedback and throw it in this trash can"

They disappeared for like 5 years, but they've been back in force recently

There’s a large body of growth hacking specialists, working in agencies or who go from one company to another, who try anything. They get slapped on their finger a lot but pretty much never face the consequences of pushing the line.

I suspect that some of them have tried that continuously for the last five years, repeatedly got their pop-up censored—until, one day, it went through because the person who cared about it left that position.

This and apps sending advertisements in push notifications are the two things that grind my gears about the iOS experience. The latter is already against the TOS as far as I’m aware but apparently never enforced since basically any food delivery app out there violates it.

The worst is Snapchat. I like Snapchat, I want to have it installed and with notifications turned on, but the advertising notifications were just beyond the pale. Clickbait text leading to content I have 0 relation to or interest in, sent super frequently

Marketing push notifications used to be entirely banned. They're permitted now, but they're supposed to be behind a specific opt-in.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/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.

It used to say:

> 4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used for advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes or to send sensitive personal or confidential information.

I suspect Uber's in too-big-to-fail territory here.

Or the use of "should not" instead of "must not" is giving them the leeway they're using.

Is it fruitless to try reporting a delivery app to apple? I used to get literally 10 marketing push notifications per day from an app so I disabled notifications and now wait for them to call me to get my order (paying COD)

Notification channels is legitimately top 3 features I missed going from Android to iOS as my daily driver. Rideshare apps (Lyft, Uber) are by far the worst offenders, with Amazon coming in a close third. I want notifications when I need to go downstairs and when I can expect service to be delivered, I do not need a notification for 10% off some aspect of the app I’ve never used and will now never use as a result.

It’s wild that I cannot opt out of these forced ads without fundamentally crippling the app itself.

Praying something like this comes to iOS soon.

I’m not sure about Uber proper, but Uber eats and DoorDash actually DO let you disable the advertising notifications :) I was so happy when I found that. In Uber eats it’s Account > Privacy > Notifications

Going to their mobile website would give you 95% of the same experience and you wouldn't have to even think about disabling ad notifications

It's especially frustrating for food delivery apps. Other then messaging apps, there's no app I more want a push notification from than food delivery, but the sheer amount of spam forces me to turn off notifications.

Now my dinner is sitting on our porch getting cold because they "notified" me that my food was here, but didn't knock or ring the doorbell :-(

Hmm, I see a market for an app that can turn on and off notifications, e.g. "Allow Evil Delivery App to send me notifications for the next hour". It'll probably be impossible to pass through the app store overlords.

Or a notification "firewall". I know Pushbullet has permission to see all my notifications and to forward them to my desktop PC, I can also dismiss them from the PC, so I guess it'd be possible to make a similar app that filters notifications and dismiss the spammy ones.

IIRC custom "are you enjoying this app? please review!" popups are against guidelines. Apple has an API to prompt for reviews which it enforces a limit of three prompts per year, and you can (supposedly, i've never seen the option) disable it system wide. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/requestin...

Both of these are correct, if you use the native API. A lot of apps hide behind their own “are you enjoying” pop up and then only give you the apple API prompt to leave a review if you say yes lol. I also dislike it, and have mine set to not allow in the system settings.

However I also have the native API prompt appear after ~2 weeks of use in my own app, at the end of the day good reviews and actual money to devs is the only way the business works, App Store is super competitive. I’d love to bypass the App Store and not deal with reviews and be able to cleanly offer upgrade pricing!

Yeah, I just tend to give one star and a review along the lines of "was pretty good, but popped up a marketing window that interfered with using the app." At least with the required Apple UI for the popup the app can't filter that out before it goes to Apple, although I assume this kind of review gets filtered out without consequence somewhere in the pipeline.

I’m astonished that Apple isn’t more proactive on those. Underwhelming apps not being downvoted and pushing people to use browser interactions will kill their ecosystem more surely than fraud.

Then again, the fiasco of trying to find the ChatGPT OpenAI app doesn’t sound like they care enough about that platform.

That one boggles the mind… how long would it take to clean up the imposter apps - a few hours? I guess leaving them up might be a 4D chess tactic against Microsoft

The one reality Apple must face is that if they were hostile enough to large companies in curtailing their bad behavior there would be more incentive for them to make noise about issues with the App store, either via the legal system, legislation, or supporting alternative platforms in earnest.

There's alot of people who, for instance, if Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, and Google all supported a different platform, they could migrate with little effort.

Right now you're usually missing some or all of them which is why alt operating systems often have support for Android apps (APK compat) so users can have a lower switching cost.

iMessage is only so good in terms of lock in

When I get those I open open the store and rate them the lowest possible with the comment "begging for stars".

You have to do it in the app/play store directly as they usually highjack non 5-star ratings in-app.

Probably that’s it. So apple heavily rate limits this pop up(IIRC, an app can ask for a review 3 times in 365 days), it’s possible that they are spending their allowance to counter for the negative reviews that they are likely receiving right now.

The developer can't know if a dialog is displayed, so it's a standard practice to time these strategically but if you like you can spend it in a row.

I don't know why Android and iOS allow apps to nag people to rate them. Even worse is, they have also shipped SDKs to allow to directly rate the app without leaving it at all. One recent pattern I've also noticed is apps asking you to "enable" notifications after you've blocked them.

the problem is probably that you're not using old.reddit.com. reddit is unusable in its redesign form

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