Can we talk about push notifications?

Yes, notifications are a mess on many platforms. I especially agree that pushing advertisements as notifications is unconscionable.

By the last several months of my ownership of an Android phone, I had nearly surrendered to notification purgatory--wherein you just give up on dismissing them. The ones that really got on my nerves were notifications from the Android Market ("Google Play") about application updates, caused by applications having auto-updated or by those that would not auto-update because they wanted to promote their permissions in some way. The irony being that I installed virtually no third-party apps on that phone so the notification noise was particularly frustrating. Oh, Google Finance updated itself? Who cares?

So far, I've found notifications on Windows Phone to be far less annoying. Though by making them less intrusive, they've also made it slightly easier to ignore them. And that too may be a problem in some cases. All told, though, I'd rather ignore a few than be bothered by to the point of surrender by notificatrivia.