Allow me to disable notifications from an app unless I have opened it within the last X hours.
I’d set it to a couple hours. My food apps could then tell me the order is ready, but can’t spam me with “Special Offers For You” days later.
Maybe I can do this with an automation?
I also want something else that I wonder if I could dummy up myself. I want to change certain phone behaviors based on whether or not a given Bluetooth device is connected.
My use case is "when I'm on my motorcycle, connected to headset audio, I want (a) the phone to read me texts and (b) to turn on navigation audio." I do not want either of these things UNLESS I'm on the motorcycle with the Cardo turned on.
After all, topics like this are why we succumb to their curation and App Store monopoly instead of using more open devices.
But with all that said, don’t kid yourself with any thoughts that the “we” in your sentence refers to anything more than a practically immaterially small contingent of nerds. Poll 100 people off the street and for the vast majority of them, a more “open” mobile platform is—at best—some nebulous advantage of owning an Android phone that some dweeby family member ranted to them about. In reality, they are reality not directly making use of any of that “openness”, instead just using a worse, malware-infested iPhone alternative.
And I believe the "we" refers to far more people than you describe. It's ultimately a question of UX.
> Apple updated its App Store guidelines today with a change to its traditionally strict restrictions around push notifications. Apple has long banned apps from using notifications for “advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes,” but that changes today. Apps can now send marketing notifications when “customers have explicitly opted in to receive them.” Users must also be able to opt out of receiving the ads.
> The change follows a couple incidents over the past two years in which Apple bent its own rules by sending out push notifications that read a lot like ads. Since other companies’ apps could be banned or have their push notification privileges revoked for that behavior, the moves were criticized as another example of Apple getting away with special treatment because it controls the platform.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21165087/ios-apple-push-no...
2.5.16 Widgets, extensions, and notifications should be related to the content and functionality of your app.
2.5.18 Display advertising should be limited to your main app binary, and should not be included in extensions, App Clips, widgets, notifications, keyboards, watchOS apps, etc.
Unfortunately I don't know how to do the same with notifications that are sent via SMS.
With how much Android and iOS have copied from each other, that seems like fertile ground to improve the experience.
In practice, apps also abuse the channels and tag things as (at least) direct messages when they are not.
Android is much better in notification config flexibility vs iOS.
Whenever I get a spammy notification from an app I'd prefer to not uninstall, it's always logged under a general category that is mixed in with notifications that I want. Amazon for example has channels for Alexa, account authentication, and then a notifications category.
A “good idea” that doesn’t stand up to adversarial actors isn’t a “good idea”. And I assure you that your developer buddies were just as complicit as the evil business-people and marketers in ruining it.
I've also been happy with my career. I've only had one scummy feature handed to me my first week at a job. I called out the product manager for it during a full engineering team meeting, asking him if he thought our customers were stupid, and earned a lot of good will with the other engineers for calling him on his shit. He was fired within the year, I'm still on the team, and that implementation is now gone.
If there's a clear benefit to society, I don't think it would be an absurd regulation at all, and there's precedent for equally fine-grained/detailed regulations in many industries.
Another one of that category I'd love to see: Mandate at least one secure 2FA method other than SMS-OTP.
I allow very few notifications on my phone, and nearly all the exceptions are iOS built-ins like Mail (which I still heavily restrict). Honestly, I think the only non-Apple exceptions are my VOIP softphone and Teams.