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Comment by delecti | Hacker News Reader

Does iOS not have anything akin to the concept of Android's notification channels? Using Doordash as the example, at the OS level I can independently disable "General" notifications, which cuts out all the advertising spam, Delivery Status, and Payment Status. Long-pressing on an offending notification displays a button that takes you directly to the channel which that notification went through, potentially so you can disable it.

With how much Android and iOS have copied from each other, that seems like fertile ground to improve the experience.

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iOS has limited extra settings for notifications that are "time sensitive" and "direct messages", mostly to allow excluding them from notifications summaries and sending them immediately. It doesn't have the same rich/extensive notifications channel support android has.

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.

Android had a good idea that the scumbag MBAs and marketers ruined.

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.

This tribalism is flat-out childish.

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.

This is a poor argument. Don't murder is a good idea for a law even if it doesn't stop everyone. Most apps do implement channels correctly, because if they don't they get uninstalled.

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.

Do you have first hand knowledge of who initiated this change?

Best app I've bought for android in years is buzz kill which lets you auto dismiss notifications that match certain terms or icons, or cool down apps so they can only notify you once in x mins etc. it's really tidied up my notifications queue

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