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.

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

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

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

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

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

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..

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:

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 !

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.

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?

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).

> The most used apps on my Android phone (older Google pixel model) are Firefox and gmail and just a handful of other things. As a notification channel, my email inbox is actually far more useful than mobile push notifications. They are more actionable and informative. And I can individually unsubscribe them or filter them out and easily find them back.

There’s also substantially more filtering happening in the inbox which is mostly useful from a user perspective.

Yahoo literally wrote a paper more than a decade ago showing how they can model predictive causal chains for emails they expect you to receive, as an example.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2740908.2741694

Gee lets take a 5 inch screen phone and have every notification stack up in 1 inch worth of space. I really hate ios18. Too bad ios26 is even worse.

> if that's how you feel, you haven't tuned your setup

The withering cry of the software engineer "just tune your setup!" This is simply not a thing that people will do.

The defaults are so, so important. They are crucial. The vast majority of people rely on the defaults to be sane. The defaults should be sane.

For Slack, I find just changing the default notification sound to a simple and subtle ding works well.

When I’m focused, I don’t hear it because it’s too subtle. But when I’m not concentrating on anything, it’s more noticeable and I don’t mind the distraction.

This might not work for everyone (“YMMV” and all), but I’ve personally found it a very effective yet simple solution.

If you are very present on slack, ofcourse you dont feel that you are interruped.

Same for things like Uber.

I do want to know when a car is arriving.

I don't want messages asking if I'm hungry.

And soon, those appointment reminders might quietly be dismissed by your phone without you being any the wiser.

I absolutely hate medical marketing. I recently decided to switch dermatology practices over a combination of bad data management, unwelcome marketing for cosmetic dermatology products, and unsolicited SMSs. I never consented to receive marketing or texts (or to lose my data in a data breach, or to be billed for the in person services by practices other than the one from which I received services and ignored unopened as spam because I didn’t recognize the sender, etc…)

But I digress.

Been an app developer since 2009, worked on Android for 6 years at Google. Push notifications suck, users hate them.

Simultaneously, I cannot match the pull quote, an argument summary, to their argumentation. IIUC if the reword patent / Apple’s summarizing disappear there’s 0 reason to say it wasn’t control passing purely to the consumer.

So I’m left a bit empty as the high-minded purpose has little backing, and thus comes across as bloviating.

It should but apps don't let us decide.

An intermediate seems to be trying to fix it.

Is it ideal? No. But it's the spammers who are to blame.

I mean... record the time we first send a push message, when a client connects have it tell you if it's because it got a push or user interactive start, check the time between push and connection, add that to your choice of time series graphing tool. Graph by platform, and you can see when the platforms are delaying pushes.

Some of the delay will be ordinary things like their push service fell over or is unreliable (you also get some feedback when they don't accept push messages), or their push connection runs into silent NAT timeouts on some networks. But some of it will be things like you ran into an undocumented push quota, so Blackberry users don't get timely pushes at peak, etc. On client platforms where you have reliable background execution with network connectivity, you can potentially signal connecting clients if platform push isn't working well and have them switch to persistent connections until the push service comes back. But that was never an option for iOS; it hasn't been a reasonable option for Android since at least Android 6 when Doze was introduced... and app killers before then made it hard before then; and all the other platforms are dead. Now, push really just has to work.

AFAIK, Apple has always been willing to deprioritize pushes when you send "too many", especially when there's no user interaction; or when they added silent (voip) pushes to wake up the app, they only let you have a few silent pushes if you don't post a user visible push.

For ordinary async messaging, push latency doesn't become a big deal until it hits double digit seconds. For voice/video calls, you really want pushes to be as near to real time as possible, or the caller is gone before the callee phone rings.

I think that's what the Notification Organizer on Android (maybe Pixel exclusive, not sure) does. It's sorting notifications into broad categories using AI and groups them in the notification shade.

Speaking from the standpoint of a user: I consider my attention a scarce resource that needs defending.

To the extent a platform has the same assumption, its interests are aligned with mine.

To the extent a sender does not have this assumption, I want the platform to defend my attention on my behalf.

I can't believe this still isn't a thing outside of GrapheneOS. Being able to revoke network permissions is a fundamental security and privacy tool that's willfully left out of both Android and iOS.

There's zero reason not to include it as a toggle.

> You think there might be some sort of interaction between both facets there?

With the exception of one trying to extract currency from the other, in exchange for something of dubious value—no.

Probably depends on the user. Along with push notifications for almost every app on every one of my devices, I disable the summarization.

For me the notification is the point, and the point of notifications to me is that they deserve my attention. Of the vanishingly few apps I install these days, almost nothing can say it deserves my attention. Even my bank doesn’t get those privileges.