Push notifications – What to push, what not to push, and how often
eugeneyan.com
eugeneyan.com
How is this kind of computer science any more ethical than the chemists who worked to modify tobacco to be more addictive?
Apple and Google are complicit in this too. Product addiction drives smartphone addiction, so don't expect them to take any real steps to protect the average person from this sort of psychological abuse by their phones.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21165087/ios-apple-push-no...
Unfortunately other parts seem to think the opposite. For example, Apple News by default sends notifications for puff pieces like years-in-review rather than just urgent breaking news.
4 years ago I was using a Fitbit, and for some reason they thought push notifications was a great channel to promote a new watch product. It blew my mind that someone at Fitbit thought that was a great idea.
Anyone considering using push notifications for marketing purposes, I’m sure you’ll make a couple of sales short term, but for me, you damage your brand
I think adding such dials to the operating system could help align the user interest of not being spammed with the engagement metrics used to motivate the spamming a tiny bit.
Android gets a lot of shit for a lot of things but the notification is top-notch ... on iOS it seems like an afterthought (e.g. how long it took for iOS to get web push).
Some apps think their stupid spam is important enough to have a single notification channel for both the spam and actually important stuff like order status.
Whenever I see a spam notification, I immediatelly go mute the channel and the problem never repeats itself.
If you want to know when your audiobook is downloaded or when you get a your next credit is available, you also have to put up with promotional "X book is 40% off" garbage spam.
There's nothing to force you to be honest. It only forces you to specify a channel when you post a notification. You can as well just create a single one for everything, which is exactly what some apps do.
I want notifications during order/delivery. I don't want the push notifications any time after that.
I expected this article to discuss push-notification payloads and use cases, but no… it’s about spamming the user about products. It’s as if the author doesn’t even understand what push notifications are.
I don't want this to happen, either. Does disabling push notifications also disable this use of them?
Both Apple and Google have strong controls on the apps identity, so it won't be like email spam where the sender can just send from a new email address to get around the filter.
Sort of a spin in the concept that it’s much easier to create bullshit than debunk it.
Or you could think just as hard about blocking it as you do about circumventing it, like in the case of this scenario, add weight to users. Obviously newly installed app users who are rating badly is a sign of something fishy, weigh their ratings a LOT lower than someone who has say many hours of usage in the app.
if i don't want the notification i'll disable/silence/mute/lower the priority of it either on installation of the app or when it starts to offend.
Like I get it, marketing matters a lot, and being able to market to your existing users is something that makes sure companies survive and I accept that.
But because I find your app worthy of being on my phone doesn't mean I find your desire to constantly control what I'm looking at on my device or take away from that. And I think personally as the device manufacture its your job to safeguard YOUR customers too with the ability for them to report nefarious apps.
And why must Apple or Google do something? Well because I can't make the iPhone or Android so I cannot change the underlining code to make sure that the notifications I need (delivery notifications) aren't drowned out or not received because I don't want the "We used a bunch of machine learning to determine this thing that you don't want is something you may want, you should add it to your cart!" notifications.
"Eh just wholesale disable notifications" isn't always the best solution and the device manufacturer should be aware of that.
A way to tell the manufacturer that an app is abusing their customers with notifications and allow them to take that ability away and enforce channels being properly used is a net good for everyone (except those who abuse it)
That argument could equally be used to argue that push notifications shouldn't be implemented at all.
It amuses me to think that some people probably believed that email would never go anywhere as a technology because spam.
The emergence and frowth of spam has greatly reduced how much people use email, though. It appears that spam is well on its way to effectively killing it.
Marketers do seem to eventually kill anything they touch.
No shit. The postal system was solidly established before postal spam existed too.
Email spam's existence was anticipated though.
I should be able to opt out of Amazon's marketing push notifications without ALSO opting out of getting delivery alerts.
Sadly, my version of Android seems to lack these finer-grained controls. I got an OS update a couple of months ago, though. Perhaps these are newer than that?
The blanket allow permission is being abused.
I'm not sure how it is on iphone, but on most apps on android I can mute some types of notifications while letting others through. The OS will also revoke all permissions after the app has not been used for a month or so.
Maybe not so overzealous though. I'll let a few through because I know it CAN be abused but some don't abuse it so badly. A marketing notification here and there is fine, but a few of them send me multiple DAILY. Those get muted and then the next time an app causes me to go to my notification settings, I notice the previously muted one and I determine "Have I used this meaningfully lately?" if not, after muting the current notifications app, I go an uninstall the previous ones.
Not to me. Any use of push notifications for marketing purposes is an abuse of push notifications in my view.
I thought both android and ios has opt-in notifications? In other words if you're receiving a notification, you already explicitly opted into them at some point.
No. Push notifications are notifications. They have to notify you about something that has happened that concerns you, personally. Like if someone sent you a message, or commented on your post, or liked your content. A sale in a store, or an app update being available, or it being a certain time of day, does not, ever, under any circumstances, qualify as a reason to send a push notification. No matter how cringe-cutesy it is and how many emojis it contains.
Bulk push notifications in any shape or form Just. Should. Not. Be. A. Thing. Period.
I need to update for the new pattern of notifications, but my article[1] from 2014 remains valid -- stop the notifications -- either as soon as you install an App or as part of your weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly digital cleanup chores. Many friends have thanked me countless times for this small suggestion I wrote down on my blog. These days, forget the idea of productivity; everyday/casual living can really benefit without the need for extra nosy/noisy push notifications.
As an app developer, platform service provider, when you know you can but have a teeny-tiny bit of a doubt, do not push that notification.
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2014/missing-step-productivity-activi...
At a bank I worked at, we enabled salary transaction notifications. Soon we found that because the salary was deposited into everyone's account at the same time from the bank, a large amount of notifications was trying to be sent at the same time which caused a bunch of services to suddenly receive a lot more traffic than usual.
On the face of it, it could have suited me ("What to push: Being helpful and engaging")
But looking into it, I feel the writer has a more cynical worldview than me, and I found this a bit distasteful.
I think that this resource is not useful to me, because it is undermined by greed. The end goal with this article is, IMO, people's pockets - not fulfilling people's needs.
If the premise is to determine how many alerts the user will tolerate before taking action to silence them, it's known up front the alerts are unwanted and harm the user. The alerts are intended to drive product addiction. By definition, that's unhelpful to the user.
The user is tricked by their phone, using the same noise and vibrations a direct message from friends or family that requires immediate attention causes, to force the offending product's brand into the forefront of their mind and make them decide to ignore the notification, investigate the notification, or silence the app's notifications.
They want to maximize the number they can send, because they are studying the individual recipient to learn what they're more likely to respond to. Once they know that, they can barrage the person with those things they can't resist until product addiction is achieved, and yet another smartphone zombie is created. Yet another person who will not put down their phone to drive their car, have dinner with their families or tend to their own needs.
The author must know the damage their work has done to people's lives, and this "be helpful and engaging" nonsense must be how they rationalize it.
I think a lot of it is simply "other people do it, so I have subconsciously justified it"
Similar to how easy it is for our society to eat meat from factory farming.
How disappointing to find that the title is BS, applied to an article that’s focused entirely on spamming.
Push notifications might never even be shown to the user. They may be for the application’s consumption, to avoid polling a remote server.
1) we limit promotional notifications to one per user per day. All campaigns that target a given user are ranked based on expected monetization or engagement. This involves a large batch scoring job that runs overnight
2) we also limit promotional messages to one every x days, where x is personalized to the user. The more you open/click, the more you get and vice versa. employees sometimes complain about the amount of email they receive - it’s because they are naturally power users, opening everything.
On top of that, we’ve built levers to temporarily boost revenue by targeting a given opt out rate. Say our baseline is 1%, we may be ok with temporarily having a 1.2% rate to get $x more revenue. This involves an opt out prediction model as well.
1) When I install an app, I give it all requested notification permissions.
2) When an app sends a poorly-timed notification, I add it to a notification profile that limits when notifications are shown. When an app sends me an annoying message (anything marketing-related, or anything that looks like it's intended to drive "engagement"), I disable all notifications for the app.
3) If the app is not usable with notifications disabled, I stop using the app. If the app is required by a service I use, then I cancel the service.
> employees sometimes complain about the amount of email they receive - it’s because they are naturally power users, opening everything.
Doesn't the fact that this happens indicate that this approach is a bad one?
That's insanity. Do you really change your prices so often that you have to get that information to users every day?
Marketing push notifications are absolutely the worst part of spam because you HAVE to interact with them.
Her philosophy for using her phone seems to be "Just press OK until I get what I was looking for".
> The more you open/click, the more you get and vice versa
User here: You can fuck off and this type of horrid behavior is getting your app/service/whatever spam bullshit it probably is permanently blacklisted off of all of my devices and in my network.
The only people not blocking your notifications are the people who don't realize they can do that after the initial nag you get from your OS about notifications on/off.
> Push notifications can be considered a form of recommender system
Recommender systems can also be viewed as a marketing optimization problem, which I guess would be the step beyond push notifications; recommending to future rather than current users. Interestingly, it has been shown that ‘expert consumers’ prefer user-based recommender systems https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09696....
For example, on iOS, when prompted for notification permission, users are now asked to choose if they want the notifications sent to a summary view. iOS will also invite users to disable notifications from apps they haven't interacted with recently.
Here are a few of the options available for each operating system. Many of these were introduced within the last 1 to 3 years.
iOS & Android:
* Apps can choose to send notifications without sound/vibration. These are less disruptive and less likely to result in an uninstall or disabling of push.
* Apps can customize which sound is sent with the notification, if any. On Android, the vibration pattern can also be customized.
* Apps can choose to replace an old notification with a new one. This helps prevent multiple updates from crowding a user's notification center (e.g. Order received, Order Arriving, Order Delivered)
* Apps can send notifications at different priority levels. On iOS, apps can even send notifications that break through a user's focus mode settings (e.g. for emergency alerts), but this requires special permission.
* Apps can group multiple notifications for easier readability (e.g. chat messages from different contacts)
* Apps can set a visual badge on their application icon, indicating the presence of new content, with or without also sending a push notification.
* Apps can choose between sending a push notification or starting a Live Activity. Live Activities have more visual customization and can show real-time updates such as sports scores or the status of a food delivery order. Starting with iOS 17.2, released in Dec 2023, Live Activities can be started remotely, just like push notifications. Prior to 17.2, users had to open the app to start them.
* Apps can implement Notification Channels, a way to categorize different types of notifications so that users can enable some but not others.Granted, an app sending spam notifications often doesn't want to make this distinction..
iOS has a "Time Sensitive notifications" type that will popup immediately, even when user assign the app to summary view. But the type is assigned by sender alone. It is still possible to spam it.
Apps can tell that you have disabled notifications, and nag you to re-enable them.
Back when I used cyanogen, I could deny permissions to an app while tricking the app into believing that those permissions were granted. The app would just get an empty contact list, no GPS signal, etc. Even with recent improvements, stock Android still falls short in this regard.
The first time an app does this, that app gets uninstalled. No exceptions.
This is something that is underutilized by non power users on Android, and makes it FAR better than iOS on top of the already better notification delivery system
recently got an iPhone 15 Pro and man, iOS sucks
The only people who put up with these spammy bullshit notifications are people who aren't aware you can disable them in the first place. I wish the app stores would do something about this, like give us a spam report system a la email that lets you mark these parasitic marketers as the spam they are.
While we can debate the merits/demerits of push - for practical commerce, a large part of the world still switches on push, and relevant push will deliver more concrete and better ROI.
No, you don't have to guess. You can correctly know that the answer is "no". If you're going to blatantly send unwanted marketing to the user, at least be honest with yourself and your audience about it.
> But with pushes, we have to guess what is the upper limit of unwanted marketing the customer will tolerate
I'd rather not use a service than to get adds. The day YouTube stops me from using an adblocker I'm going to have a lot of free time on my hands!
Another instance but via notification was that someone would lose their product if they didn't complete the transaction (24 hours notice). This wasn't a lie - we reserved inventory for 24 hours for a buyer as it was a unique product. Versus something like booking which is eternally telling me someone else is about to reserve the room I'm considering renting.
Then that's a plain abuse of push notifications, in my view. If the user didn't ask for marketing messages, they shouldn't be pushed.
There’s literally no way we could break that down! How can we guess what the user wants when they REFUSE to tell us! I guess we better just leave it so they can opt out if they successfully navigate all 6 toggles, but if they do that we better just flag their account for suspicious activity because I don’t know why anybody would ever opt out. Seems suspicious to me.
Given the history of online advertising it can readily be inferred that ads do not provide enough value for almost any user to want to opt-in.
As soon as I get a single unwanted notification from an app, that's it, I kill all its notifications privileges. Any other annoyances, and the whole app gets uninstalled. My attention and focus are too valuable a resource.
I agree it's a good intellectual challenge, as far as mental gymnastics go.
You don't need any notifications from apps as long as this is not an instant messaging app. (You can make additional exception for your banking app, but that's it for 90% of users)
My phone is now so silent.
But some IM I treat as a really instant communication channel with my family: I don't want to miss any message from my kids or "I am at grocery, do you need something?" from my wife
Maybe they are more careful because I'm in the EU?
It's hard to avoid because I need to have those notifications enabled for when I chat with friends on the platform.
Instagram does this too, albeit with less intensity.
In all seriousness, I recommend the app FilterBox, it allows you to set fine grained rules for notifications for each app