I also just think it’s a weird leaky abstraction to bubble up to user space. I’m just imagining my mom looking at a notification channels area in settings. It’s a weird thing to ask users to conceptualize. Also it’s not something you can really enforce at review-time. It would be something Apple and Google would need to constantly monitor — at any time a VC could ask their investees to turn the screws on monetization/engagement and an app could become a spam machine overnight.
Something better would be something like a non-removable option to report individual notifications from any app as spam, kinda like how it works will email. That way, Apple and Google could offload their monitoring overhead to machine learning models and punish companies acting in bad faith whenever there’s enough user frustration to justify punishment
I really just think individual notifications (not apps) just need an explicit “this is spam” report button.
I do that sometimes. Not that it matters, because rarely any notification seems to deep-link into an app these days.
It's stunning to me that Google let's them get away with pushing ads through notifications.
That doesn't follow, IMO. I have tons of communication platforms that aren't allowed to notify.
Typing this all out, these are all young people things so i don't expect someone with kids and a mortgage to have the same experience but imagine if your sms app was littered with ads and you couldn't turn off their notifications without missing messages from your children needing assistance. That's basically the type of dirty attention capture these companies are engaging in.
If you don't understand why someone would use snapchat or other image based social messaging apps then you won't understand this particular issue as you don't have it.
I have Slack and MS Outlook on my phone for work, which are both communication apps, but notifications are muted.