Push notifications should be a privilege, not a right.

Just turn them off? That’s what I do, my phone never annoys me.

@ulkesh@beehaw.org
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So the author both wants notifications and doesn’t want notifications.

Got it.

Sure sounds like a problem of their own making. And I find iOS’s notification taming rather simple to use. So I use it, and amazingly I have less notifications because of it!

T (they/she)
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I realized at somepoint I was ignoring everything on my phone because of the number of notifications. Now I disable EVERYTHING and only leave important stuff. I wish this was the default.

@CaptKoala@lemmy.ml
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I did the same many months ago, though I suspect I may need to redo as I’ve been getting some really long notification piles when I don’t check my phone for a day…

Install app. Start app. “Allow notifications?” No.

Does iOS not do this?

Apps that I do allow notifications: when they become annoying I go to the notification, long hold > settings > notification categories. If they only have one category and don’t let me fine tune then I don’t need that app or just don’t need notifications from it. Back to settings I have other ways to customize that can make them less annoying like silence them.

The article has some valid points about wanting certain kinds of notifications from an app, and hating the spam notifications those apps send.

However, iOS does indeed allow you to grant or deny an app notifications permission on first launch, and my default is to always deny.

The only apps I allow notifications for are phone, calendar, messages, my tasks, and my automations (shortcuts and some associated apps)

iOS does that the first time you open the app. An app never opened can’t send notifications (it wouldn’t have registered).

Install Graphene OS or Lineage OS as notifications for the majority of apps require Google Play Services and completely are killed without them.

Or just turn notifications off in your OS of choice, if having no notifications is a solution for you.

The problem is that some notifications are useful, and so completely axing notifications isn’t a very good solution.

How do people struggle with notifications? This is even weirder than the ad-blocking thing, because at least you are required to find and install a third party app to solve that. Every app ever has notification settings built-in. Just take 20 seconds out of your day to setup the app correctly when you first install it and you will likely never have to worry about it again.

You might have found out if you bothered to read the discussion before sharing your opinion.

@14th_cylon@lemm.ee
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Your “rhetorical question” and objections you raised were already answered in this thread before you raised them.

were already answered

It sounds like you still don’t understand what a rhetorical question is.

Seems you’re the one who doesn’t understand what a rhetorical question is. Hint - it’s not what you retrospectively call a question when you get called out on your laziness.

Nor is it rhetorical when you ask a question and then spend several lines going on about it, and making it clear that you really did want to talk about an answer.

it’s not what you retrospectively call a question when you get called out on your laziness.

Didn’t happen.

Nor is it rhetorical when you ask a question and then spend several lines going on about it, and making it clear that you really did want to talk about an answer.

Also didn’t happen.

Didn’t happen.

do some red circles and arrows help?

Also didn’t happen.

Schrodinger’s rhetorical question is when you decide whether your question was rhetorical or not based on people’s reaction to it.

What does this thread add to the discussion?

(this is not rhetorical)

Why are you asking me? I’m not the one accusing others of “nOt rEaDiNg dA tHrEaD bEfOrE u AsKeD a qUeStOn”. My top level reply was on-topic. No one has actually provided an on-topic reply to it yet.

Why are you asking me?

because you are the one who started it. people usually contribute information into public discussion with hope it will be useful to other readers.

I’m not the one accusing others of “nOt rEaDiNg dA tHrEaD bEfOrE u AsKeD a qUeStOn”.

no, you are the one AsKIng rHETOrIcal qUEsTioN 🤣

No one has actually provided an on-topic reply to it yet.

you were pointed to the fact that your questions were already answered and you can easily read these answers. that is as on topic as it can get.

you chose weird hill to die on.

On Android you need to opt in to notifications for every app you install. Just opt out :)

Or, be like me and keep your phone on do not disturb(except calls from contacts). Doing this was one of the most significant quality of life improvements for me over the last few years.

Yeah that’s what I’ve done. I’ve gotten very picky about which apps I allow to notify me of things. A week or two of turning off all the ones you don’t want and your phone gets quiet real quick.

Both on Android, and iOS, opting out of notifications solves most of the problems. You can do all on your own time without constant nagging, and leave notifications on for the communication channels you really need.

However, what I hate with passion are shopping and delivery apps that suffer with disabled notifications (I don’t know when things arrive, and that would ideally be good to know within seconds), but enabled notifications mean that there would be a lot of spam notifications about ordering and buying more.

a1studmuffin
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AliExpress is the worst at this. Which category should I disable? AliExpress, aliexpress, Chat or message push? And even if I figured it out, there’s no way to stop store spammers from sending you useless messages constantly, detracting from actual sellers with questions.

shopping and delivery apps

So don’t use 'em.

Norah - She/They
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Yeah, no way to lose my trust faster than abusing your notification privileges to send me spam.

Some apps let you customize notifications, some let the OS customize them… some get muted, and some uninstalled.

For example, Amazon lets you keep the account and delivery notifications, but disable the promotional ones.

Deconceptualist
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BuzzKill is great for wrangling your notifications. Match a word or phrase and group them, snooze them, set special vibration patterns, whatever.

If something’s going to try to grab my attention, it had better be worth my while. I block as many notifications as I can, both on my phone and my computer. I also try to avoid using apps for things unless I have to.

But don’t you want to open this website in our app so that we can better track you?

God I hate reddits mobile website, especially when you try to view an nsfw post

Norah - She/They
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Swap the “www” in the url for “old”. Desktop site but it doesn’t stop you viewing NSFW content.

Just abandon the site altogether. They do have good content but they’re user hostile.

I know. That’s what I always do but navigating a desktop site on mobile is horrible :(

@Blackmist@feddit.uk
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I have a simple rule. If I install an app and it shows me any notification I don’t want to see, I immediately block it from having permission to do that.

Not everyone has figured you can do that by long pressing the offending notification

Sphere
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Same… Have done for ages now. Don’t know how anyone puts up with the default behaviour.

The default now is that apps have to first request notification permissions, on both iOS and Android.

Most users are blindly accepting any and all requests by apps.

@Zworf@beehaw.org
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Yeah but that’s really their problem. I mean, the OS literally asks them to allow it. What more can you do?

@realharo@lemm.ee
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At least Android also proactively asks them whether to disable notifications for an app if they always swipe them away, or if they haven’t used the app in a long time.

On android long press a notification and it’ll show you which category of notification it is from that app, with the ability to disable just that one category if desired. E.g. advertisements and feedback reminders

Some apps don’t export the category, but still let you disable it from inside the app. In my book, they get a close pass.

This article seems strangely lacking in how it wants this goal to be achieved.

I wonder if there is a notification ad blocker with community-submittted sets of regex patterns that root users can use.

@Zworf@beehaw.org
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I don’t really have any issues with it. Samsung has very fine-grained controls and most apps I simply don’t grant notification permissions at all. Also I put every single chat group in Whatsapp, Telegram etc on Mute by default which helps a lot against overload.

By the way, I give it a year or so by when phones can run a local AI to automatically filter the notifications you’re interested in.

Yeah I feel like they neglected to show how much more of a problem on iOS this is than Android.

On Android apps typically have their push notifications divided into different types and can almost always turn off the marketing notifications for an app while leaving the important ones on.

I dont see even half of these notifications on Android.

On Android apps typically have their push notifications divided into different types and can almost always turn off the marketing notifications for an app while leaving the important ones on.

Oh, iOS doesn’t have this? I didn’t realise. Android has had this for a good few releases now and I love that.

For Android users Buzzkill is also great for apps that don’t have granular enough notification settings. You can set up rules to make it automatically dismiss the notifications you don’t want to see.

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