These regularly spaced and frequent junk notifications are so important to tech companies because they drive product addiction. Interrupting your day 16 times forcing someone to decide to scroll their feed yet again today, until they're as helpless as Pavlov's dog.
How is this kind of computer science any more ethical than the chemists who worked to modify tobacco to be more addictive?
Apple and Google are complicit in this too. Product addiction drives smartphone addiction, so don't expect them to take any real steps to protect the average person from this sort of psychological abuse by their phones.
I'm shocked Apple hasn't tried to fix it and use it as selling point. Smartphone companies don't need to hook the user anymore, almost everyone is high on the smack at this point.
Part of Apple clearly wants to do that with Focuses giving more control around what notifications people get in which contexts.
Unfortunately other parts seem to think the opposite. For example, Apple News by default sends notifications for puff pieces like years-in-review rather than just urgent breaking news.
It’s not only push notifications, it’s the combination of everything communication channel combined. I recently unsubscribed to a services that kept spamming me their “lifetime subscription” product, while I already was on their yearly premium plan. Over the course of 2 weeks, I received 4 push notifications, 4 emails and 2 times when I opened the app it had a full screen ad. I’ll never use this product again. Ironically, this app focuses on sleep quality, focus and meditation.
4 years ago I was using a Fitbit, and for some reason they thought push notifications was a great channel to promote a new watch product. It blew my mind that someone at Fitbit thought that was a great idea.
Anyone considering using push notifications for marketing purposes, I’m sure you’ll make a couple of sales short term, but for me, you damage your brand
I agree. Push notifications could have been useful, but companies abuse them so heavily that they're the opposite of that, and I keep them disabled across the board.
Something I wish Apple and Google would support is notifications that are only delivered if you’ve opened the app during the last 2 hours. Taxi and food delivery services for example have a reasonable usecase for push notifications, but only around the time when I’ve opened the apps.
I think adding such dials to the operating system could help align the user interest of not being spammed with the engagement metrics used to motivate the spamming a tiny bit.
Android has notifications channels ... mute the spam/ad ones. I only have the payment and delivery status channels on alert, the others are not muted but "silent" (i.e. the show up in the notification tray but doesn't alert me). you do get some deals sometimes.
Android gets a lot of shit for a lot of things but the notification is top-notch ... on iOS it seems like an afterthought (e.g. how long it took for iOS to get web push).
I have rule that audible notifications are urgent, mainly messages and alerts. Silent notifications for everything else and can be sorted in bulk later. I haven’t had to mute any notification channels yet.
Some apps think their stupid spam is important enough to have a single notification channel for both the spam and actually important stuff like order status.
Android forces app developers to categorize notifications (the API is called notification channels). Each channel can be muted individually in the system settings. Though it's up to the app makers to correctly categorize their notifications, in my experience most apps do this.
Whenever I see a spam notification, I immediatelly go mute the channel and the problem never repeats itself.
The problem is still bad actors. Take for example audible. They deliberately put everything into a single category "Member notifications"
If you want to know when your audiobook is downloaded or when you get a your next credit is available, you also have to put up with promotional "X book is 40% off" garbage spam.
> Android forces app developers to categorize notifications (the API is called notification channels).
There's nothing to force you to be honest. It only forces you to specify a channel when you post a notification. You can as well just create a single one for everything, which is exactly what some apps do.
It shows, though it's a bit obscure. Long press the notification, then press notification settings. It will scroll you down and highlight the notification channels item. Press on it. After a second, it will highlight the channel the original notification was belonging to.
I use the websites for GrubHub and DoorDash, on both laptops and mobile devices. Both have reasonable mobile sites, other than the regular exhortations to use the app instead.
Don’t assume that a push notification is going to be shown to the user. It may be for consumption only by the app, to avoid the need for polling a remote server.
I expected this article to discuss push-notification payloads and use cases, but no… it’s about spamming the user about products. It’s as if the author doesn’t even understand what push notifications are.
I wish I could approve specific template strings for notifications. I want things like "%s replied to your comment". I don't want things like, "%s is %d% off this week!".
I'd much rather the OS have a "report spam" button on notifications, and if more than 5% of app users report spam then the whole app gets all notifications blocked by default.
Both Apple and Google have strong controls on the apps identity, so it won't be like email spam where the sender can just send from a new email address to get around the filter.
Seems like that would be a cheap way to destroy a competitor. Pay a bunch of people on some sketchy freelancer site to install the app, do whatever easily trigger notications.. and then report every single one.
Sort of a spin in the concept that it’s much easier to create bullshit than debunk it.
Because you're taking the solution to the absolute bare minimum implementation to achieve the desired result and then applying a ton of thoughts and considerations on how to get around THAT implementation and saying "Yeah this is gonna get abused" and throw your hands in the air.
Or you could think just as hard about blocking it as you do about circumventing it, like in the case of this scenario, add weight to users. Obviously newly installed app users who are rating badly is a sign of something fishy, weigh their ratings a LOT lower than someone who has say many hours of usage in the app.
i guess the solution in the comment i described as anticompetitive is solving a problem that really isn't a problem ... you have the ability to turn off notifications (or notification channels in the case of Android) if they seem spammy. why is the mothership turning off notifications for an app due to heuristics of a broad set of users.
if i don't want the notification i'll disable/silence/mute/lower the priority of it either on installation of the app or when it starts to offend.
Because there needs to be some kind of penalty for being a shitty person to your users.
Like I get it, marketing matters a lot, and being able to market to your existing users is something that makes sure companies survive and I accept that.
But because I find your app worthy of being on my phone doesn't mean I find your desire to constantly control what I'm looking at on my device or take away from that. And I think personally as the device manufacture its your job to safeguard YOUR customers too with the ability for them to report nefarious apps.
The penalty is they lose their privilege to notify you because you turn it off, thereby losing out on your future revenue through marketing to you via notifications. Again, the question is why must Apple or Google do something each person can decide to do themselves?
Because some apps unfortunately are a necessity and we can't vote by removing them from our devices, but that doesn't mean we also decide to accept getting promotional notifications every hour on the hour from them because they take advantage of the fact that they're a necessity on our devices.
And why must Apple or Google do something? Well because I can't make the iPhone or Android so I cannot change the underlining code to make sure that the notifications I need (delivery notifications) aren't drowned out or not received because I don't want the "We used a bunch of machine learning to determine this thing that you don't want is something you may want, you should add it to your cart!" notifications.
"Eh just wholesale disable notifications" isn't always the best solution and the device manufacturer should be aware of that.
Yes Android has channels, iOS doesn't, but Android having channels doesn't mean that they are being used correctly.
A way to tell the manufacturer that an app is abusing their customers with notifications and allow them to take that ability away and enforce channels being properly used is a net good for everyone (except those who abuse it)
push notifications and the ability to silence them is fine ... there's no issue to solve here other than the misconception that notifications can't be turned off per app basis unless the app store does it for you
The issue here is that the abuse of push notifications makes push notifications borderline worthless. That's why I don't allow them at all on my machines. The value they provide is swamped out by the abuse of them.
It's easier to just disable them all by default, really, then I don't have to bother with micromanaging on an app-by-app basis. This is particularly true given that the majority of push notifications are spam.
I wasn't talking about OS defaults. I was talking about my personal use of my machines. I don't allow any push notifications by default because the benefit of them is tiny compared to the hassle of dealing with them.
Email was solidly established on the internet before email spam existed.
The emergence and frowth of spam has greatly reduced how much people use email, though. It appears that spam is well on its way to effectively killing it.
Marketers do seem to eventually kill anything they touch.
The wording of the notification is enough to train a spam filter and determine the urgency of the message. Both companies should be in favour - Google because the feature makes push notifications less useful compared to their ads, Apple for user experience.
Both operating systems already require opt in (at the system level) for applications to be able to send notifications. I think Android enforces this even for apps targeting older API levels, except you just get prompted for the permission when you open the app.
The thing I have a problem with in this method is you're blanket opting in or out of notifications. I'd much rather have notifications bucketed into two systems. Transactional and marketing, just like email.
I should be able to opt out of Amazon's marketing push notifications without ALSO opting out of getting delivery alerts.
Sadly, my version of Android seems to lack these finer-grained controls. I got an OS update a couple of months ago, though. Perhaps these are newer than that?
Lyft sends me junk notifications even when I have not launched the app in months. Yet when I do request a ride, I absolutely want to be notified of any status updates.
Doesn't most apps use different notification channels now a days?
I'm not sure how it is on iphone, but on most apps on android I can mute some types of notifications while letting others through. The OS will also revoke all permissions after the app has not been used for a month or so.
A better solution would be that the OS forces app developers to separate in categories their push notifications and have in the notifications options which of those notifications would be enabled or not, how often and how frequent before a notification is presented. This would then be gathered by the OS as how many notifications were silenced and how often were they acted upon, then force that as default to all notifications. More importantly, there must not be a "important" flag or something that hints hierarchy. If a notification is important, describe that in the category description.
Apps using repetitive junk push notifications to drive product addition has a side effect of driving smartphone addiction. Good luck expecting apple or google to curb smartphone addiction.
I might be in the minority group. But any app that sends me a push notification that I haven't specifically opted in for is going to have all notification privilege removed right away.
A lot of the time it's actually a reminder for me to uninstall the app.
Maybe not so overzealous though. I'll let a few through because I know it CAN be abused but some don't abuse it so badly. A marketing notification here and there is fine, but a few of them send me multiple DAILY. Those get muted and then the next time an app causes me to go to my notification settings, I notice the previously muted one and I determine "Have I used this meaningfully lately?" if not, after muting the current notifications app, I go an uninstall the previous ones.
>But any app that sends me a push notification that I haven't specifically opted in for is going to have all notification privilege removed right away.
I thought both android and ios has opt-in notifications? In other words if you're receiving a notification, you already explicitly opted into them at some point.
> Push notifications can be considered a form of recommender system
No. Push notifications are notifications. They have to notify you about something that has happened that concerns you, personally. Like if someone sent you a message, or commented on your post, or liked your content. A sale in a store, or an app update being available, or it being a certain time of day, does not, ever, under any circumstances, qualify as a reason to send a push notification. No matter how cringe-cutesy it is and how many emojis it contains.
Bulk push notifications in any shape or form Just. Should. Not. Be. A. Thing. Period.
Unless an App/Platform/Service is an “if you miss the info, you/someone dies or might die or almost die,” then the notifications should be user-initiated. As a user, I should be the one who opted in to say, “Yes, I like this category of updates, and it is OK to send them to me.” Many an app/company assumes by default when I sign up or even use my email/phone to contact/connect for anything that, “Baaaaam, there you go -- fished another one -- send in the onslaught of our ads, hook, line, and sinker.”
I need to update for the new pattern of notifications, but my article[1] from 2014 remains valid -- stop the notifications -- either as soon as you install an App or as part of your weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly digital cleanup chores. Many friends have thanked me countless times for this small suggestion I wrote down on my blog. These days, forget the idea of productivity; everyday/casual living can really benefit without the need for extra nosy/noisy push notifications.
As an app developer, platform service provider, when you know you can but have a teeny-tiny bit of a doubt, do not push that notification.
Another side effect to take into consideration when offering notifications to customers is the impact on your services if customers action on those notifications.
At a bank I worked at, we enabled salary transaction notifications. Soon we found that because the salary was deposited into everyone's account at the same time from the bank, a large amount of notifications was trying to be sent at the same time which caused a bunch of services to suddenly receive a lot more traffic than usual.
This interested me, as it would be a nice concept to build a manual around.
On the face of it, it could have suited me ("What to push: Being helpful and engaging")
But looking into it, I feel the writer has a more cynical worldview than me, and I found this a bit distasteful.
I think that this resource is not useful to me, because it is undermined by greed. The end goal with this article is, IMO, people's pockets - not fulfilling people's needs.
They must know this right? It seems the "Be helpful and engaging" is a bit of self delusion to pretend they aren't having such a wide negative impact on all of humanity with this kind of research.
If the premise is to determine how many alerts the user will tolerate before taking action to silence them, it's known up front the alerts are unwanted and harm the user. The alerts are intended to drive product addiction. By definition, that's unhelpful to the user.
The user is tricked by their phone, using the same noise and vibrations a direct message from friends or family that requires immediate attention causes, to force the offending product's brand into the forefront of their mind and make them decide to ignore the notification, investigate the notification, or silence the app's notifications.
They want to maximize the number they can send, because they are studying the individual recipient to learn what they're more likely to respond to. Once they know that, they can barrage the person with those things they can't resist until product addiction is achieved, and yet another smartphone zombie is created. Yet another person who will not put down their phone to drive their car, have dinner with their families or tend to their own needs.
The author must know the damage their work has done to people's lives, and this "be helpful and engaging" nonsense must be how they rationalize it.
Marketer here. I’ll add how my company does it (10m+ list size)
1) we limit promotional notifications to one per user per day. All campaigns that target a given user are ranked based on expected monetization or engagement. This involves a large batch scoring job that runs overnight
2) we also limit promotional messages to one every x days, where x is personalized to the user. The more you open/click, the more you get and vice versa. employees sometimes complain about the amount of email they receive - it’s because they are naturally power users, opening everything.
On top of that, we’ve built levers to temporarily boost revenue by targeting a given opt out rate. Say our baseline is 1%, we may be ok with temporarily having a 1.2% rate to get $x more revenue. This involves an opt out prediction model as well.
1) When I install an app, I give it all requested notification permissions.
2) When an app sends a poorly-timed notification, I add it to a notification profile that limits when notifications are shown. When an app sends me an annoying message (anything marketing-related, or anything that looks like it's intended to drive "engagement"), I disable all notifications for the app.
3) If the app is not usable with notifications disabled, I stop using the app. If the app is required by a service I use, then I cancel the service.
Shows you've never used Poco phone. Old ladies at my job use weird no name phones, which are 120$ tops, and amount of ads they're getting is 10x times more than what Poco has. They all have ads on their lockscreen.
One promotional notification per day is one too many. The only people leaving notifications enabled on your app are those who don’t know how to disable them.
It's worth playing the "what if everyone did this" game: I have ~20 apps installed on my phone. If everyone sent 1 promotional message a day, I would be getting 20 per day. Which would mean more than one each waking hour. That's about as many notifications that are actually of use to me each day, and that amount of spam would effectively render notifications useless to me. I'm very thankful I can disable notifications for apps.
> we limit promotional notifications to one per user per day.
> The more you open/click, the more you get and vice versa
User here: You can fuck off and this type of horrid behavior is getting your app/service/whatever spam bullshit it probably is permanently blacklisted off of all of my devices and in my network.
The only people not blocking your notifications are the people who don't realize they can do that after the initial nag you get from your OS about notifications on/off.
> Thus, as we go from search to recommendations to pushes, it becomes harder to understand the customer’s intent
> Push notifications can be considered a form of recommender system
Recommender systems can also be viewed as a marketing optimization problem, which I guess would be the step beyond push notifications; recommending to future rather than current users. Interestingly, it has been shown that ‘expert consumers’ prefer user-based recommender systems https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09696....
Banking apps are the worst. They make us switch on notifications, else we can't get any confirmation notices for us to confirm transactions, then they proceed to spam me with credit card offers and other rubbish I'm not interested in receiving.
If any app does this, I revoke its push permissions (sometimes after very briefly checking if it has a “no marketing pushes” option). If that makes the app unusable, it goes to the trash. There’s more than one bank.
One detail not covered as much in this article is that many options are now available to users and apps to control the push notifications they send and receive.
For example, on iOS, when prompted for notification permission, users are now asked to choose if they want the notifications sent to a summary view. iOS will also invite users to disable notifications from apps they haven't interacted with recently.
Here are a few of the options available for each operating system. Many of these were introduced within the last 1 to 3 years.
iOS & Android:
* Apps can choose to send notifications without sound/vibration. These are less disruptive and less likely to result in an uninstall or disabling of push.
* Apps can customize which sound is sent with the notification, if any. On Android, the vibration pattern can also be customized.
* Apps can choose to replace an old notification with a new one. This helps prevent multiple updates from crowding a user's notification center (e.g. Order received, Order Arriving, Order Delivered)
* Apps can send notifications at different priority levels. On iOS, apps can even send notifications that break through a user's focus mode settings (e.g. for emergency alerts), but this requires special permission.
* Apps can group multiple notifications for easier readability (e.g. chat messages from different contacts)
* Apps can set a visual badge on their application icon, indicating the presence of new content, with or without also sending a push notification.
iOS
* Apps can choose between sending a push notification or starting a Live Activity. Live Activities have more visual customization and can show real-time updates such as sports scores or the status of a food delivery order. Starting with iOS 17.2, released in Dec 2023, Live Activities can be started remotely, just like push notifications. Prior to 17.2, users had to open the app to start them.
Android
* Apps can implement Notification Channels, a way to categorize different types of notifications so that users can enable some but not others.
Permissions don't matter much. Of course you need to be able to disable permissions for specific apps, but if you want to receive e.g. user messages but not promotional spam, there is nothing you can do.
iOS has a "Time Sensitive notifications" type that will popup immediately, even when user assign the app to summary view. But the type is assigned by sender alone. It is still possible to spam it.
There's a problem with the current status quo, at least on Android.
Apps can tell that you have disabled notifications, and nag you to re-enable them.
Back when I used cyanogen, I could deny permissions to an app while tricking the app into believing that those permissions were granted. The app would just get an empty contact list, no GPS signal, etc. Even with recent improvements, stock Android still falls short in this regard.
> * Apps can implement Notification Channels, a way to categorize different types of notifications so that users can enable some but not others.
This is something that is underutilized by non power users on Android, and makes it FAR better than iOS on top of the already better notification delivery system
If I was ruler of the world I'd outlaw all Marketers and Advertisers and subject them to a Ludovico Technique type of thing where they have to sit through inane, mind-numbing, mind-killing ads popping up on screens every 3 seconds. Let's see how they like this little world of brain rape they've built for themselves.
The only people who put up with these spammy bullshit notifications are people who aren't aware you can disable them in the first place. I wish the app stores would do something about this, like give us a spam report system a la email that lets you mark these parasitic marketers as the spam they are.
While we think of push more in context of notifs - this same logic can be applied to any recommendations that come over a channel where intent is to be inferred based on past behaviour versus determined based on user input - be it on email, or any messaging channel or even on a subsequent visit to a page.
While we can debate the merits/demerits of push - for practical commerce, a large part of the world still switches on push, and relevant push will deliver more concrete and better ROI.
I'm trying to think of necessary push-notifications, and all I can come up with is "stuff from loved ones, but not spam of whatever mom finds in Facebook." This is an area where a user-focused app would let me use an AI to classify what bubbles up to push notifications. Alas, the incentives are wrong for that. App-makers will use the tiniest, tiniest excuse they can make up to solicit attention from a user.
> But with pushes, we have to guess what the customer might be interested in given triggers such as events, promotional offers
No, you don't have to guess. You can correctly know that the answer is "no". If you're going to blatantly send unwanted marketing to the user, at least be honest with yourself and your audience about it.
For me, that limit is “none”, I have stopped paying money to several services I used regularly the first time the mobile app gave me an unsolicited notification.
No. Most customers will tolerate quote a lot of this form of advertising just like other forms. Enough to make it profitable to spend significant effort on it.
In your opinion. In marketers' or app developers' opinions, it continues to make them more money so that's what they'll do, regardless of whether a small minority of consumers complain about it. Of the people I know, only technical people have turned off notifications, most average users simply have long lists of notifications on their phone, that they may or may not look at, ironically making the value of each notification from some random app a lot less.
Depends. We had a system that someone would favourite a product they are interested in, and when it went on a meaningful discount (20% or more) we would send them a notification letting them know. This had pretty good engagement compared to just shooting notifications out.
If a user specifically uses a feature that asks for notifications about a product, then you're just doing what the user asked you to do. The problem comes in when sending such notifications without them being requested by the user, which includes if the user "favorited" a product but that "favorite" operation had nothing to do with requesting promotions of that product. ("This is a thing I like" is not an invitation for spam about buying it; "Help me buy this" is an invitation for desired messages about buying it.)
I'd say its a grey area in our case. The user isn't using a "tell me when discounts happen" feature, but rather a favourites feature where some of our marketing said to favourite things to get a discount.
Another instance but via notification was that someone would lose their product if they didn't complete the transaction (24 hours notice). This wasn't a lie - we reserved inventory for 24 hours for a buyer as it was a unique product. Versus something like booking which is eternally telling me someone else is about to reserve the room I'm considering renting.
I'm in Europe. They have to tell us they want marketing messages otherwise its against the regulations and would result in fines. We followed those rules!
But but our notification policy is just “Do you want notifications, including security alerts, new messages, emergency information about your account, and promotional messages and advertisements, and you agree that we can sell all your data”?
There’s literally no way we could break that down! How can we guess what the user wants when they REFUSE to tell us! I guess we better just leave it so they can opt out if they successfully navigate all 6 toggles, but if they do that we better just flag their account for suspicious activity because I don’t know why anybody would ever opt out. Seems suspicious to me.
And this is why pretty much none of my apps are allowed to send notifications. At all. Too many poisoned apples in the barrel and I just have lost my trust for the lot of them
As soon as I get a single unwanted notification from an app, that's it, I kill all its notifications privileges. Any other annoyances, and the whole app gets uninstalled. My attention and focus are too valuable a resource.
Fascinating the sort of elephant-in-room ignoring bubble that articles like this inhabit. What next? How best to drive cars down residential streets at full speed? How about how to slap people around the head without them doing the same to you?
I agree it's a good intellectual challenge, as far as mental gymnastics go.
I default block notifs (no, I refuse to call them properly, they are not worthy of that respect) on any and all newly installed applications. I might unblock later if it's useful or worth my time, but don't count on it.
Two years ago I learned from some Twitter post a new habit: every time you install an app on your phone, you must do one more step: block its notifications.
You don't need any notifications from apps as long as this is not an instant messaging app. (You can make additional exception for your banking app, but that's it for 90% of users)
I've had almost the same apps installed for years now, but is that really necessary? Just disable the notification channel after the app sends the first undesired notification.
Instant messaging apps don't need notifications either. It upsets some people at first, but it is for the most part perfectly fine to just check and respond messages in your own preferred frequency.
For me this becomes worse: If I don't get (reliable) push notifications for things I want updates on, I tend to become obsessive over checking it. The more different things I am checking this way, the worse it becomes in terms of disruption to my focus. Push notifications unify multiple streams together and let me go 'I don't need to check this, I'll get a notification if there's any update'.
I could agree: it always depends on personal preferences or usage scenarios. Even I have some IM apps' notifications disabled and I check them only once in a while.
But some IM I treat as a really instant communication channel with my family: I don't want to miss any message from my kids or "I am at grocery, do you need something?" from my wife
the only apps that i have with notifcations are, as you mentioned, instant messaging apps and apps that i'm using to build a habit (language learning, meditation that sort of thing). everything else is turned off
The model for me is duolingo. They gamified a thing I wanted to learn so I mostly didn’t mind the notifications. It’s still important to have timely and relevant information though.
If you send me a push and I can’t explain why I’m seeing it (for example, if it’s not time-sensitive or I haven’t done anything to indicate I want it) then I consider it spam. This is doubly so if you’re using it to send me an advertisement. That’s the easiest way to ensure your app is going in the trash.
I think this was covered:
> Another challenge is that irrelevant or unwelcomed pushes risk having the user disable notifications, uninstall apps, or start ignoring them due to low usefulness
> most recommendation engines take a myopic view, over-optimizing on immediate user responses at the cost of long-term satisfaction.
It’s “covered” in that they write this and then immediately dive into an example where I buy a phone and start receiving push notification advertisements for buying cases. Do you think an app is going to ask me if I express interest in “related offers” or just start sending them unsolicited?
Uber's Apps are so shit when it comes to that. I can rarely recall a time when I opened the app and closed it without finding anything useful and it didn't send me a notification within minutes.
Indeed. I still use Uber from time to time and don't want to have to wait around reinstalling it, so I took the time to go through the settings and disable this crap. The Uber eats app got the boot, though. I only ever used it like twice anyway.
I have the Uber Eats app installed and I don't receive unwanted notifications. I think I only enabled the channel for notifications on a current order, and I don't get anything else.
Maybe they are more careful because I'm in the EU?
I install it when necessary on trips and once I land at SFO I just delete it. During that time it generally sends me 2-3 unwanted notifications but there's not much I can do about that except grumble.
Instacart was abusing push notifications with advertising. I disabled their notifications and forced them to use SMS. They haven't sent me any ads that way, because SMS would cost them a trivial but non-zero amount.
How is this kind of computer science any more ethical than the chemists who worked to modify tobacco to be more addictive?
Apple and Google are complicit in this too. Product addiction drives smartphone addiction, so don't expect them to take any real steps to protect the average person from this sort of psychological abuse by their phones.