so many examples of this type of anti-competitive strategy already being used. why implement something with known deficiencies?

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.

They are, that's why Android enforces notification channels. I don't know about iOS though as I don't use it.

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)

> why implement something with known deficiencies?

That argument could equally be used to argue that push notifications shouldn't be implemented at all.

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.

Yeah but it's on an app-by-app basis. Just disable push on the noisy/spammy ones and keep it on for well-behaved apps.

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.

The problem with off by default is that 99% of users will never even think that is something they can turn on.

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.

Cynicism.

It amuses me to think that some people probably believed that email would never go anywhere as a technology because spam.

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.

>Email was solidly established on the internet before email spam existed.

No shit. The postal system was solidly established before postal spam existed too.

Email spam's existence was anticipated though.