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Comment by pants2 | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem are apps that do both. For example, I want Uber to notify me when my driver has arrived, but I don't want it to notify me when they have a special 10% discount on my next 5 rides. It's not straightforward to block one but not the other.

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If I order an Uber, I already know it is coming. I was the person who ordered it.

This is how taxis worked for decades before smartphones existed. You phoned for a taxi, then remained vaguely aware that it would arrive shortly.

The question is whether a single “it has arrived” notification is worth the surrounding noise: “driver accepted”, “driver is nearby”, “rate your driver”, “here’s 10% off your next ride”, and so on.

In most cases, it is not. The useful information is either already obvious (you can see the car outside) or you have re-opened the app to check where they are.

Operational and marketing notifications should never share the same permission. Until that is enforced at the OS level, I will treat them all as unnecessary spam.

The point of notifications is the convenience of not having to constantly check your phone for every single app you have (amazon delivery? just eats delivery? uber booking? claude finished its task?).

And the inconvenience to constantly having to check your phone

> The point of notifications is the convenience of not having to constantly check your phone for every single app you have (amazon delivery? just eats delivery? uber booking? claude finished its task?).

My phone has been on DoNoDisturb since 2010 or so. Here's the reality: I don't check for any of those things. Delivery drivers can ring the door bell. If I'm very hungry I'll keep the app open and check where they are. I literally do not care to be notified about any of the things that apps want to notify me off.

Anyone who cares to reach me knows to ring the phone twice in case of emergency to get through DnD. Anyone else? The best time to call is text me. Or schedule a time.

As for Claude, the point of clankers is that they work in the background. The robot can wait, their infinite patience is a feature.

Same here! If this phone made an unexpected sound I'd smash it with a brick.

I guess you probably have no dependents and never been oncall then if you are on no disturb. For many people, having to poll the state of multiple ongoing tasks is time consuming itself or/and focus breaking enough that some apps are deserving of having notifications.

Manually polling multiple items as you go around your day is stealing valuable mental bandwidth that could be used in better things.

> Manually polling multiple items as you go around your day is stealing valuable mental bandwidth that could be used in better things.

I both agree and disagree with you. I disabled notifications for everything and found myself refreshing email too often. But if I have the notifications, I can get disturbed too often which also takes mental bandwidth.

For me I found the best tactic was to selectively enable notifications (whatsapp for just one person), and delete (not silence) everything else - I don't have email on my phone now - the temptation to check it is more than the need to have it. As for things like PagerDuty, I have it send an SMS and phone me instead.

> the best tactic was to selectively enable notifications (whatsapp for just one person), and delete (not silence) everything else

Hundred percent agree. I wouldn't support having notifications for everything enabled.

Oh I’m on essentially permanent 2nd tier oncall and occasionally 1st tier. Pagerduty has an exception configured. If you message me on slack it shows up on my home screen and I will probably notice in the next 15 minutes or so.

I find polling less disruptive because my phone or watch are almost always nearby. Being in control of when to get interrupted feels better than having stuff constantly pop up while you’re doing something.

Just holding my partner’s phone spikes my cortizol. You try to type 2 sentences and get 5 notifications for random other apps and messages popping up on screen in the meantime. Literally one notification every 10 seconds on average. It’s horrible

You know it is not a binary option, right? You can select what apps you want notifications from and most apps have at least two types of notifications you can toggle.

Your house already has a built-in notification system, which can be activated by the delivery guy, once he is physically at your location.

A built-in notification system that everyone from your local politician asking for your vote to your Jehovah Witness recruiter can and does abuse. Way to waste your time.

You can silence it just as easy and in difference to the digital alternatives, the amount of time wasted is symmetric.

Android has different types of notifications for apps and can have them filtered separately. Unfortunately, some app makers like Uber are bad about labeling. Google would need to enforce labeling so transactional and advertising notifications are separate.

“Bad about labeling” is pretending that might be an accident. Uber has repeatedly demonstrated they will do all the dark patterns.

iOS has the thing they call “time-sensitive notifications” which is a flag you put when submitting notification that is supposed to be Really Important Right Now. Unfortunately it’s not easy to mute everything that is not time-sensitive

>If I order an Uber, I already know it is coming. I was the person who ordered it.

Which makes me wonder why you have notifications for your bank and Whatsapp enabled.

If I have an account, I know what transactions are coming out of it. I was the person who owned the account.

If I have someone's number, I know if I want to see messages from them. I was the person who gave them my number.

Seems really sill that you have notifications enabled for those apps. If you care about missing something, you'd just check them anyway.

>If I have an account, I know what transactions are coming out of it. I was the person who owned the account.

What if you receive notification about transaction that you didnt make? :)

I have notifications enabled for my bank because it may alert me to transactions which were not made by me, and because it does not abuse that permission to send me marketing spam.

I have WhatsApp notifications enabled because it is the primary way people communicate where I live. If my elderly mother messages or calls me, it will most likely be through WhatsApp.

Both of those notifications contain genuinely important or time-sensitive information which may require action on my part.

That's the distinction between them. A person contacting me is fundamentally different from a brand attempting to engage me. Transaction alerts are fundamentally different from “your order is out for delivery”.

The criteria is not “did a thing happen”. It's whether the notification gives meaningful new information that is important or time-sensitive, and requires me to take action.

Most app notifications fail that test completely.

The difference is that taxis would either give you a call that they were here or they'd just wait for. They don't care either way if you show up or not because the meter is running. The Uber is gone if you don't show up in 5 minutes. That is if you are lucky and the driver didn't mark themselves as "here" when they were 2 blocks away, which seems to be the norm here now.

> This is how taxis worked for decades before smartphones existed.

Seems like a useless observation in a world that has had smartphones for decades then, huh? The notification use here is a two way ping, communicating from the driver that they're here and to not needlessly waste your time looking around or "remain[ing] vaguely aware [they would] arrive shortly" and being inattentive, thereby wasting the drivers time and chance of profit. We're all glad you personally have a cute little value system that let's you frame your cute little acts of defiance as a war against big bad change, but no one here needs to defend to you why receiving a notification on an app needs to be helpful in a life-changing way for the feature to be considered useful. It's now considered useful for millions of people who arent you, so let's have a discussion about making it less distracting or better suited for tasks, instead of geriatric pining about the nostalgia of simpler times.

For me, it's quite straightforward. If an app makes an unsolicited spammy push, it's notifications-off. No exceptions.

Snapchat has to be the all time worst offender to me about abusive level of notifications. Luckily, you can turn them off, but holy cow batman, that's a lot of notification options to deal with.

Remember when Android used to let notification senders hijack turning your screen on, Snapchat used that one a lot.

That's "growth hacking" for you

For me the worst is NextDoor. I don’t have the app installed, but they also have email notifications. There are seemingly 100 options and I turned them all off when I first made the account. Periodically they add new ones and auto-enable them for everyone. There is not universal way to shut them off, short of blocking them all together or deleting my account. The account was such a pain to setup that I’m hesitant to delete it, for the 1 time every couple years where it’s useful.

Even worse with ND e-mails are how they've absolutely perfected the cut-off character limit for what's being posted in your area. So my inbox is just perma-barraged with click-bait-y "This place on Smith Street has the best...", "Health officials are investigating an outbreak of...", etc.

That is why I just filter ND emails to spam. Those patterns just reaffirm I don’t want the kind of content they offer.

I flagged them as spam the other day.

Yep, I straight up deleted my Nextdoor. Nextdoor itself is spammy and ad ridden. And most of the content in the community is also just spam anyway.

My neighborhood has a WhatsApp. I engage with it if I feel like it. Works great

Yes. I’d rather live with the temporary inconvenience of needing to open the Uber app to check the status of my ride once a month than wade through notification spam on an intermittent basis forever.

Has been like this on my phone for a while. It's crazy when you see someone who hasn't blocked everything and their phone dings multiple times a minute.

Agreed, there’s a level of trust and as soon as the app breaks that trust with spam, notifications get turned off for that app.

I just refuse to grant permission as my default. If I ever feel like I’m missing out, I can turn it on later. Usually I don’t and if I do I quickly regret it.

No one willingly says "yes" to advertisements, but people will say "yes" to important-updates(-and-advertisements).

Then why is it whenever I watch someone use their computer they always accept cookies?

1. accepting cookies is not the same as opting-in to advertisement

2. because most of the time, any other option is bloody inconvenient

Because companies are trying really hard to hide the "no" button: it's a single click to say "yes to all", but a safari through dialogues to say "no to all"

Same with websites like Youtube who don't understand a plain "no" but offer a fake choice between "yes, harvest all my data" and "ask me again later". That isn't consent, it's coercion.

They are choosing the lowest friction option.

Because people don't actually read what they are clicking on or even understand what they're doing. They just want to make the annoying banner go away. Same reason why people mash the next button when installing software.

Hundreds of thousands of people declaratively opt into receiving marketing with informed consent on a daily basis. Just because you don’t does not mean other people are like you.

Yes… seeing my wife’s email inbox is mind blowing.

Maybe she didn’t opt in, but she will never unsubscribe from anything.

Emails from every site she’s ever shopped at.

> Emails from every site she’s ever shopped at.

This too is frustrating. Spam is not allowed unless you have a "prior relationship".

But fuck me, that single toddler's bike I bought many years ago for my then toddler no longer qualifies as us having a relationship.

I mean, it's kind of an insurmountable obstacle. Why bother trying to unsubscribe when you're always gonna get spam anyway? It's just gonna come back.

Also, websites are shady. If you put in a required email, they'll usually automatically check a little box for you that says "allow us to ruin your inbox?" How helpful of them.

And, I'm not even convinced that checkbox does anything.

I just flag every marketing email as spam. It's much more effective than unsubscribing since it tells your email provider to just redirect everything from them to spam, and it causes trouble for the sender.

Exactly. Unsubscribe is for newsletters you consciously subscribed to but no longer want. Anything unsolicited that isn't a genuine one to one communication is spam and all the "unsubscribe" option does is verify that your email is active and will be able to receive more spam.

It's definitely not insurmountable. It just takes a little bit of inbox maintenance. Pressing unsubscribe and report when I have spam in the inbox, 5 seconds here, 5 seconds there. I still get spam, but it's minuscule compared to not doing this.

It's not insurmountable. Spam filters have been around for decades. They're pretty good. If I didn't expect the email, I train my spam filter that it's a bad email. There are a few that get through, maybe 1-5 a week, which require flagging.

The checkboxes seem to be a placebo. Sometimes there isn't one. Sometimes it doesn't do anything. Sometimes they say "updates on your order", which apparently also means future products you might want to buy a week after you receive your order. (Marketers' English seems like a foreign language to me).

I realise that CANSPAM as a law in the US is titled appropriately but I live in the UK where declarative opt-in is a must apart from a couple “soft” opt-in scenarios.

People. Opt. In.

Stop conflating your preferences with other people’s.

Spammers ignore both opt-in and opt-out, they do not care about UK or US law. That is where hosting provider enforcement matters.

Agreed but I don’t find the framing of labelling marketers as spammers particularly accurate or useful.

Ah yes, the law. Famously followed by every party, especially on the internet.

Riddle me this, if a shady company not even headquartered in the UK sends you a newsletter you didn’t willingly opt in to, what happens to them?

"Report as spam and block sender"

Repeat until the emails stop.

Is “informed consent” that little checkbox that is checked by default? Or is it the one with the wording that says something about “discounts and offers”? Or is it the one that’s enabled because it’s a “new category” that didn’t exist when the user signed up so why not require them to opt out? Oh, I know, maybe you’re talking about the “enable notifications? Yes/Ask Me Later” dialog that is pushed on them every single time they open the app.

I’m sorry but if you honestly think the number of users who receive marketing spam have expressed “informed consent” you’re fucking high. There is a multi-trillion dollar industry devoted to tricking people into opting into spam. Stop pretending these people are expressing any consent at all.

I live in the UK where we actually have sane regulations around this stuff, I realise laws are different and folks in the US in particular don’t have much protection from spam.

Apple should add "promotional notifications" section to iOS, then ban everyone who don't put their marketing bs into that category

Apple isn't your friend though.

edit: downvote all you want. Fact remains that there is no way currently to block advertisement notifications and no disincentives for those who use them.

Send everything to the iOS notification summary which you then don’t look at. Uber and others can send time sensitive notifications and those don’t go in the summary. It’s basically a junk notification folder.

Works well.

Yes! iOS 27 needs to categorize notifications using AI. Apps aren't supposed to advertise to you, but some don't allow for that distinction. I want notifications on for when my sandwich is arriving, but I don't want push notifications for a promotion. Some apps are good about this, others don't allow that granularity. I hate the all or nothing.

On the flipside, I have an app that sends notifications. We don't abuse it or use it for promotions, and APNS and Google's version works perfectly fine for us.

There was actually an app store rule for the first couple of years after notifications became available, basically saying don't use it for promotions. A few apps actually got pulled for sending spammy notifications.

But then everyone started doing it and Apple stopped enforcing the rule. It may still be in there somewhere as a "guideline."

It's a failure of iOS architecture to not force applications to tag each notification with labels. App developers have to build notification management themselves for fine grained control.

Android has notification channels, but I'm not sure how widely it's used: https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/compose/notificatio...

This is the kind of thing where we actually would like to have store policy enforce correct use of APIs.

Some banks also do this, and offer no way to segregate marketing from utilitarian push notifications. This is borderline abuse of trust IMO.

It's not borderline, it's absolutely crossed the line.

periodically open the app every few minutes or so. once the driver is 5 minutes away -- go outside and wait.

it's a tradeoff. eliminating notification spam means behaving more synchronously when booking a taxi. i don't mind waiting outside for five minutes. especially if i'm not getting a random ping when i'm definitely not booking a taxi :shrugs:

I prefer temporarily toggling notifications on because I really don’t trust my internal metronome.

You could set a short timer on your phone. On an iphone, its two clicks away.

Enabling notifications is not difficult. And the driver could arrive before or after the initial estimate.

The user legitimately considers the application as hostile - hence sandboxing... Notification spam filtering is now the obvious need at the sandbox's edge, with the whole customizable arsenal we have come to expect for our inbound mail. Of course, Google will not cooperate with anything likely to reduce sacro-sanct engagement !

Except that they did. Android has notification channels. Now, I suppose we could argue that Google could be more ham-fisted about forcing apps to use them, but that's murky.

In fact, Uber on Android does use these notification channels. I just have "All Promotions & Recommendation notifications" disabled, and then "Taking a ride" channel enabled.

>Now, I suppose we could argue that Google could be more ham-fisted about forcing apps to use them, but that's murky.

I disagree. What the is the point of forcing everyone to use the Google Play Store (or whatever app store on iOS) if the store doesn't stop spammers?

People complain about Uber, but Lyft does the same shit. I got a promotional notification from Lyft and could not disable it without disabling the main notifications that tell me when drivers were arriving.

If app stores were useful instead of just rent-seeking, they would kick Lyft off until they stopped doing that.

I definitely run all my emails through an LLM filter and wish I could do the same for push notifications!

And the worst part is that Apple could fix this in a heartbeat. Uber is straightforwardly in violation of App Store policies about "no advertising in push notifications", but a) they're too big to fail and b) Apple advertises via push notifications all the fucking time, so they have no leg to stand on here.

It's infuriating that the one thing the App Store monopoly could be useful for isn't even actually used in practice (if you're big enough, ofc, you and me get to eat shit if we try to evade App Store policy).

I would love if Apple enforced that rule, but they certainly don't

I believe the App Store policy is you have to have a setting to disable ads. And Uber actually has it (though it has 8 different channels or so, apparently "Uber teen accounts" marketing was added recently).

I used the setting and am not getting Uber ads (only Uber ride notifications).

Currently my biggest problem isn't ads, it's all the apps now will find ANY excuse to send you a notification in order to keep their "Daily Active User" count high.

You turn off more and more categories and they'll still find a reason.

Instagram is the worst offender, I only want to receive message notifications, but I got notifications about inane random stuff I've tried to disable but it won't work. I ended up having to disable notifications altogether.

Instagram run their notifications via an auction mechanism (which I suppose makes sense for an advertising company that likely built a lot of RTB systems).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04835

Instagram drove me so insane with that that I spent a while searching through the app to figure out how to disable it. There's a way to do it, and for a while it worked; I only got notifications about things like direct messages and posts from a few people I specifically told it to send notifications for, but I never got the "recommended" posts.

Then I got a replacement iPhone and reinstalled Instagram.app, and it defaulted to "show you notifications for everything we think you might be interested in" again, and I was too lazy to spend all that time relearning how to disable those notifications. I disabled the notifications entirely and now I open the app once a week or so to check in.

I had to do the same thing with Facebook years ago. Now I open it once a month to see who from high school got married in the last month and click the little "heart" icon and scroll until I get bored (~2 minutes). Can't trust Zuck with notifications.

> Now I open it once a month

So do I. Login on the web incognito.

Presumably enforcing this would trigger an immediate legal response where Uber claims Apple is using their monopolistic control over the App Store.

Most people aren’t aware but there are laws that require granular notification consent. For example the GDPR has it. I’m currently fighting with a major bank and educating them about my rights. I want to receive security related notifications but not get spammed by “get a loan up to 50k without lifting a finger” type of bulls*. Send send this almost every week..

On Android with notification categories it is, but iOS doesn't have that. Also, I think it's mostly a trust system. But Uber in particular does actually do it right, and you can just turn off promotional notifications.

I don’t know about uber specifically but most of the apps I use have a separate toggle for things like marketing. Maybe it’s an EU thing?

The modern pattern in anywhere that allows it is to have dozens of ambiguously labeled toggles for nominally different notification channels, described only by a minimally brief and maximally ambiguous label. All begin as active until the user, in frustration, goes in and exhausts themselves disabling individual options without being sure which one is going to turn off the one single thing they actually want to be notified about.

Then next month, you create a new notification channel for your new promotional messages because too many people opted out of the old channels. You default that new channel to opt in, to make sure the user gets their chance to experience it and share in the delight you mean to share with them.

Presumably, you continue this until you have hundreds of such toggles and presumably some kind of dedicated Toggle Engineering Department that oversees them all. Nextdoor, Meta apps, LinkedIn, and countless others all appear to be competing for the most such toggles.

After all we wouldn't want the user to miss out on our promotion of 10% off your next refrigerator. They bought a refrigerator from us just 6 months ago, after all!

Though Android does help a little for existing toggles by giving you an 'About 129 notifications per day' blurb below the entry.

It also puts a throbbing highlight (for a few seconds) on whichever channel is associated with the notification whose gear icon you used as a shortcut into the channel list. At least for Pixel phones.

That's how the design is supposed to work. But marketing realizes that no one voluntarily receives ads, so they mix em.

Tell me use iOS without telling me you do. Android has separate notification channel toggles, so I've turned off the marketing ones. I was shocked and aghast when I spent a year trying to use an iPhone that it didn't do this. Part of the reason I went back to my trusty Pixels.

While iOS doesn’t do this at the OS level I’ve never seen an app that didn’t have these options. I assumed it’s required by Apple.

Lots of iOS apps have the option, but ignore it and send you push ads anyway. Apple may require it to be present during app review, but they don't seem to enforce that it's used correctly.

Does Google actively police app's use of channels? Is there any mechanism to stop apps abusing "time critical" channels and sending unwanted marketing?

Most apps are cross-platform. If you're already required to do it on Android, going out of your way to avoid it on iOS doesn't make a lot of sense.

It absolutely makes sense (in a capitalist sense). Then you get more money/engagement/whatever on all of the other platforms.

It's the same reason Microsoft built functionality to let users in Europe have links open in their default browser instead of Edge but blocked that feature for the rest of the world.

They technically allow you to, but make it really annoying to. Uber for example:

Account > Settings > Accessibility > Communication Settings

I use Android. Lyft put marketing notifications in the default notification channel on my device. If the Play Store were useful, they'd have banned Lyft until they fixed it. (haven't gotten one in a bit so maybe they did (or maybe I set something so that the app could only message me while it's active))

Yep exactly this. The app developers are the problem, but Apple and Google are not helping here.

This. So much this.

WellsFargo does that. Important notification and advert-BS on the same channel. If you block their notifications you don't get the near-real-time Zelle alert. Enabled you get what you want and also YOU MIGHT BE PRE-APPROVED!

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