Hacker News Reader

Comment by calmbonsai | Hacker News Reader

Bad move Apple. You're really showing your finance desperation with this property with all of the ridiculous "F1" media buys. It makes you look weak. Even Brad Pitt with the, very convenient, "AA confession" timing is so gauche.

I don't care what the app is. The split second it starts using notifications to send unsolicited marketing, it's notification privileges are revoked and I seriously consider deleting it. And I run very few apps to begin with.

"It's better in the app" is, usually, just "better for the publisher" and, rarely, for the user. Use the web unless there's no other option or the app affordances (e.g. real-time navigation, health monitoring) are too valuable.

View on HN

We really need more granular notification settings already. I want to to know when my Lyft is arriving. I want to know when my food's been delivered. I don't want to know that I can get 10% off something for the next hour.

Apparently in the new beta the Wallet app actually does let you disable promotional notifications, so that's a start. Now do every other app.

This is just going to encourage advertisers to misuse the "urgent" channel you did not block to deliver advertisements you would rather block.

And that'll get your dev account terminated. Enforcing correct use of user-empowering platform features is one of the handful of good arguments for centralized app distribution.

Enforced by who?

The same company that decided to put F1 Movie ads in Apple Wallet?

Sure. Ad rules for thee, and not for me seems like the sort of self-serving decision they might make.

They tried to fix this in Android, having apps create separate channels that users can enable and disable at will. Then no app makers used them because there's no real incentive to do so. Sigh.

Is that true? I think all the apps that I had to partially enable notifications I managed to do so. To the point that I started to wonder if Google is requiring it as part of the app review process

They are used but they definitely don't enforce strict separation (which of course doesn't scale, but they could at least penalize apps that get reported by users for violating it). In most apps there is one notification channel that has both the important stuff you want and some marketing garbage.

Long time Android user, and it works great. Not sure why your experience is so different, but I'm very happy with the notification channels experience.

Amen. Every app already has my email and I'm happy to be "marketed to" there so long as I can one-click unsubscribe from them.

I stopped using the Instacart app as it just keeps piling on more and more "offer overlays" that I have to click-away. At least with the web, I can remove them with preemptive HTML parsing and just "view the essentials" to get the job done.

It's really annoying that most web pages/apps are constantly shoving 'use the app' buttons in your face. Of course, they can often be blocked, but it's somewhat infuriating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com