What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

I’m constantly amazed how passive people are with things that steal their attention

My phone is in do not disturb mode 24/7. If your app notifies me about something pointless, it gets deleted and I start using your website instead

I have a mail rule that moves any email with the word “unsubscribe” out of the inbox into its own tagged area. Every few days, I go in and unsubscribe to everything that’s arrived.

Whenever a retail point of sale worker asks for my details or phone number or asks me to sign up to their club, I ask if there’s a discount. Because if there’s no discount - they get no details. It’s a simple exchange; pay a fair price for my details for a fair price and I’ll consider it. But so far my time and details are worth more than any retailer has offered to pay.

If my phone interrupts me, it should either mean someone genuinely needs my attention right now or it should not be disrupting me at all. That's my notification set up.

Apps allowed to receive push notifications

Phone, Messages, Whatsapp, Apple Health, [brand] bank.

That concludes the list.

There is no reason any other app needs to be able to instantly ping me. Most apps are not notifying you because something matters; they are notifying you because they want your attention.

I do not need notifications about streaks, sales, recommendations, delivery updates etc. All that can wait until I choose to open the app. It is not urgent enough to justify interrupting me.

I feel like this article reads like the author is upset that Apple + Google prevent / control certain types of notifications (read: spam)

> Cross-sell, upsell, education and discovery can work on push

Push notifications should only be for transactional notifications. I don't want another inbox for junk.

Marketing and advertising people ruin everything they touch.

> For most of the channel's history they did very little of it visibly. The architecture was permissive of intervention; they simply chose not to intervene much. That restraint is what ended.

I guess it wasn't always visible, but they were intervening in some for or another since the beginning. At WhatsApp, push delay/suppression/coalescing was something we were always monitoring, and IIRC, it was part of the system since at least when I joined in 2011. If you don't work within the system, your users' messages don't get delivered timely.

> None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified.

Sounds fine with me?

I wish apple/google would implement better notification control - like the ability to turn off all marketing notifications, and a much better digest format

> Over fifteen years the channel has been rebuilt around one assumption: the receiver's attention is a scarce resource the platform is obliged to defend. … As a sender you are on the wrong side of that assumption, whichever way the control moved.

Fascinating how the author openly frames the situation as the sender and receiver’s interests being opposed.

I see the point. But honestly I am more concerned about having to constantly fight to turn off all permission allowances every time I install an app.

And the moment I have some faith and trust an app that I deem important, I get promotional junk as a "notification".

I would really like to have notifications allowed on certain apps like parking, or health etc., but all they seem to do is abuse the trust they are given, meaning I turn them off.

So where I agree with this author is certainly that more power belongs at the user.

> Google followed in 2010 with Cloud to Device Messaging, then Google Cloud Messaging in 2012, then Firebase Cloud Messaging in 2016

Classic

Massively overlong article that really could have done with an editor. Although obviously editors cost money, and I'm reading it for free, so I can scarcely complain. Nevertheless, some concision would have been appreciated.

I'm very unclear to me what the thesis of the article actually is. Yes, push notifications run through the vendor's servers. Yes, Apple fucked up hard by modifying the text within them - and I contend that such modification is impossible to perform automatically without unreliability becoming the norm.

The author also appears to believe that "broadcast copy" - otherwise known as Spam by those who like to write slightly more honestly - is a legitimate use of push notifications. It is manifestly not, and any app that tries will at the very least be immediately silenced. I wish I could find the tweet that put this sentiment more entertainingly than I ever could.

If App developers continue to abuse the push notification system in this way, Apple and Google will be forced to take steps to solve what becomes an end-user's problem. Yet another tragedy of the commons.

Push notifications are for the user, not the marketer.

From the author's blog: "I do Revenue Operation, helping Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams with data, process and technology."

I'm surprised that the article is this long with zero mention of Senator Wyden's concerns vis-a-vis Google and Apple's Push Notification system: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_...