Notification categories are like mailing lists now. You may have unsubscribed from the daily deals email but you're still going to be auto subscribed to every new slightly modified category in perpetuity. Unless you fully disable notifications for an app (in Android at least, in my experience), new enabled by default notification categories are added all the time.

I recently had to setup Microsoft Authenticator. It refused to register a code unless I enabled notifications.

You are a two factor app. I should never be in a situation where there is an unexpected login I need to verify.

> From my perspective, the more roadblocks the platforms put between unnecessary notifications and my phone, the better.

I know lots of apps behave badly when it comes to notifications but I'd still prefer if the apps controlled the level of notifications they sent. I could, of course, reduce that client-side, but I don't see why I'd want Google or Apple or any other intermediary see or control the notifications.

If an app behaves inappropriately, I could uninstall it. If a gatekeeper like Google or Apple prevent an app from sending me notifications, I'd have to change my OS, usually my hardware, too.

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.

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

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

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

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

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..

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 !

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:

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

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).

> 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.

> 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.