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Comment by sakjur | Hacker News Reader

Something I wish Apple and Google would support is notifications that are only delivered if you’ve opened the app during the last 2 hours. Taxi and food delivery services for example have a reasonable usecase for push notifications, but only around the time when I’ve opened the apps.

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.

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Android has notifications channels ... mute the spam/ad ones. I only have the payment and delivery status channels on alert, the others are not muted but "silent" (i.e. the show up in the notification tray but doesn't alert me). you do get some deals sometimes.

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).

I have rule that audible notifications are urgent, mainly messages and alerts. Silent notifications for everything else and can be sorted in bulk later. I haven’t had to mute any notification channels yet.

> mute the spam/ad ones

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.

their fault i'm muting all the relevant notifications including the spam ones. leading to poor UX. leading to the uninstallation of said app

I just wish they added (and enforced!) a distinction between transactional notifications and everything else.

Android forces app developers to categorize notifications (the API is called notification channels). Each channel can be muted individually in the system settings. Though it's up to the app makers to correctly categorize their notifications, in my experience most apps do this.

Whenever I see a spam notification, I immediatelly go mute the channel and the problem never repeats itself.

I have a Samsung and it doesn't show what channel a notification came from. Probably because of the amount of crapware Samsung bundles.

It shows, though it's a bit obscure. Long press the notification, then press notification settings. It will scroll you down and highlight the notification channels item. Press on it. After a second, it will highlight the channel the original notification was belonging to.

That's not "a bit obscure". That's almost completely hidden.

The problem is still bad actors. Take for example audible. They deliberately put everything into a single category "Member notifications"

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.

> Android forces app developers to categorize notifications (the API is called notification channels).

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 delete DoorDash after every usage because they're excessive with the push notifications.

I want notifications during order/delivery. I don't want the push notifications any time after that.

Don’t text notifications suffice?

I use the websites for GrubHub and DoorDash, on both laptops and mobile devices. Both have reasonable mobile sites, other than the regular exhortations to use the app instead.

Don’t assume that a push notification is going to be shown to the user. It may be for consumption only by the app, to avoid the need for polling a remote server.

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.

Good point, in my case when I say “delivered”, I primarily mean the phone notifying the user.

Understood. Just wanted to bring this up because the article ignores most of the possibilities of push notifications.

> It may be for consumption only by the app, to avoid the need for polling a remote server.

I don't want this to happen, either. Does disabling push notifications also disable this use of them?

I wish I could approve specific template strings for notifications. I want things like "%s replied to your comment". I don't want things like, "%s is %d% off this week!".

Buzzkill can do this on Android.

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