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Comment by leonidasv | Hacker News Reader

When they exist at all. Many apps that provide important notifications (like delivery tracking, drop-off time etc) put them under the same category as marketing stuff. You can't have just the transactional tracking, you have to opt-in for the marketing notifications as well.

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The ridesharing apps are the most annoying about this. Yes I want to be notified when my uber driver is almost here to pick me up. No, I don't want a notification about yet another sale.

It baffles me that they do this. I have to disable push notifications from Lyft entirely, so instead they send me ride updates as text messages, which surely must cost them way more money. Why not just introduce a "ride updates only" push notification category and stop this madness?

It needs to be enforced by the OS or by law. Like how you get transactional emails without getting marketing spam. I want the same for notifications.

> It needs to be enforced by the OS or by law. Like how you get transactional emails without getting marketing spam.

What glorious universe do you live in where email is respected enough to have transactions separate from marketing, and that this is not only required by law but also enforced?

There's a pretty healthy regulatory environment around it, though I have noticed a resurgence of opt-out marketing communications on signup forms, which is unwelcome (I don't know if some legal decision changed, but it seemed like for a while this was not allowed, and maybe something has made companies think that it is again).

(I decided to look it up, here's the UK rules: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/direct-marketing-and-pr... . It looks like it is allowed to be opt-out if you buy something from them, which I do dislike, but there are rules and the ICO does have teeth)

Not sure about your experience, I’ve almost never encountered a marketing email that didn’t have an unsubscribe link, as is mandated by law in some countries. So I’m not really sure what you’re talking about.

In the past, yeah. But today? Never.

> I’ve almost never encountered a marketing email that didn’t have an unsubscribe link

Have you encountered a "marketing email" that you didn't sign up for? That's called phishing.

Have you clicked on links in phishing emails? That's called getting pwned.

That’s also not relevant to the topic, which was transactional vs marketing app notifications, and making a correlation to email.

It's certainly relevant to the topic: notifications, and a claim of legal requirements.

Legal requirements are useless without enforcement.

Have you looked at the Uber app recently? 90% of it is promotionshit.

I am just looking for a fucking taxi.

Are there any VCs looking to give away a few billion dollars to disrupt the ossified, wasteful, poor customer experience taxi app market?

> Are there any VCs looking to give away a few billion dollars to disrupt the ossified, wasteful, poor customer experience taxi app market?

Waymo are rolling out, slowly. No one'll be in a real position to compete against them.

On iOS atleast, Live Activities are separate from Notifications. So I can still monitor food or grocery delivery even though I have turned off their notifications.

Now a few apps have started sending notifications through WhatsApp because they have my phone number. e.g. Amazon

Yeah, but I still see apps that don't implement those features. Mostly React Native/Flutter apps that don't bother implementing native features. On Android it's even more depressing.

I'm not worried about missing food notifications because they send me an email and a text (... and a fax and a hardcopy confirmation letter in the mail.)

On iOS atleast, Live Activities are separate from Notifications.

Should be, but not always. There are plenty of apps that still mix marketing and functional notification.

Hell, even Apple does this, especially on new devices.

[Settings]: Log in to your iCloud account to sync data.

Three minutes later…

[Settings]: You qualify for three free months of Apple Music!

Tbf both of those are promotional. If I'm not logged into iCloud, it's for a reason.

I had to disable from Android settings all LinkedIn notifications. I check it from time to time but I haven't missed anything, nowadays LinkedIn is mostly garbage

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