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.

> 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.

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; offer to pay a fair price for my details and I’ll consider it. But so far my time and details are worth more than any retailer has offered to pay.

No way!

Pun aside, it makes sense for a notification framework including a notification delivery network to be built into these mobile OSes, because the alternative (letting applications run arbitrary background services) is usually worse.

I've been doing this for many years, and none of my friends or colleagues are aware of it, and they don't need to be. Notifications don't help you respond quickly, they just grab your attention from things YOU wanted to do.

I haven't checked Discord today yet. I haven't checked my email. Whenever I do want to know if my friends wrote me, or if I have some new bills, or if I need to follow up on something, I will open the respective app and deal with it.

I can put my phone next to me for hours and not get distracted.

"...a notification lives only in the notification centre, which clears, drops and summarises what passes through it and retains nothing reliably."

Your notification center reliably retains information. Something like an inbox does exist, just not in userland: https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/10/fbi-pulle...

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

The article's point about leading with the fact rather than the brand point is useful. The notification payload I'm designing already leads with the concrete numbers.

[2] In December 2023 Senator Ron Wyden disclosed that the U.S. government and foreign governments had secretly compelled Google and Apple to turn over information from push notifications, including communications metadata and sometimes content. A detail that should bother any developer: app developers have no way to stop the practice if they want to send notifications on the platforms iPhones and Android rely on. Apple had been gagged from disclosing it until the program became public, after which it said it was updating its transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests. So the architectural hypothesis isn't speculative — it's the confirmed mechanism, differing from Section 215 mainly in domain (apps vs. calls) and legal vehicle (ordinary subpoenas, FISA orders, and NSLs rather than the specific business-records theory of §215)

[1] "Its just metadata". Thanks Obama! (joking of course, no single individual is responsible for these things, it is our collective political will and its the best we can do unfortunately)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUdm0QMDM0 [2] https://epic.org/sen-wyden-reveals-government-surveillance-o...

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.

Sounds fine with me?

So many apps use annoying and questionable marketing notifications that I'd say I have about 70% of app notifications disabled globally (because the app itself does not allow disabling notifications / has no granular control).

However, it seems that SOME self hosted services can directly notify you without APNS / FCM. As an example, see https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notif...

>an iPhone could not afford to let every installed application maintain its own background poll against a remote server. The proposal...a single persistent TLS connection from each device to Apple, over which any registered third party could deliver alerts.

I thought apps were sending notifications locally in the device. Like, if a messaging app receives a message, there's a network call for that. Then if the messaging app wants to tell the user they received a message, it can just hit a local API for that, right?

Is the pattern actually that the app makes another network call to the notification service to register the notification, which makes another network call to the device to deliver it?

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.

One of the best apps I've bought for android is buzz kill which lets you set rules around notifications. I have cool downs on family chats and social media so it doesn't keep buzzing when things kick off, filter Amazon alerts to only "we're two stops away" and "We've delivered" messages and dismiss the rest.

I have custom buzz patterns and sounds for urgent alerts and rules that batch notifications depending what WiFi I'm on, time outs on things that don't matter after a few hours etc.

My notifications list is now way smaller and far more relevant.

Also quickest way to sort out notifications is to take your phone off silent. Hearing everything coming in, you see more when it you can then decide if the notification should make noise, or exist at all on a per app basis.

So … mission accomplished then? This is pretty much how I would like it to operate.

"now here's a list of how to get around that!"

I still get notifications (SMS, email, calendar, etc) but nothing pushed

Classic

The fact that they do not do this reveals that phone makers are sort of market makers between app makers and customers, creating an environment which, in a certain sense, is a neutral ground between these two types of "users."

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

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.

So good for me.

But there's some really scary stuff in here happening to other people that I'm not even aware of.

For some android phone brands delivery reliability is like 40-50%. Some brands are better (reaching 80%, still bad) some very bad (usually the chinese brands, for some reason).

And the user has no say in this. They can't say: deliver every notification without classification. Or "allow this app to wakeup whenever it wants". Everything is babysat by the great overseer, even if you write the app yourself for yourself.

Have fun writing a telephony app that receives only 50% of calls. :D

> Your visibility into all of this is poor by design, and getting worse.

Great! This article is all good news, it seems.

On iOS I have to find the right setting page and then all notifications are either on or off. Doesn’t make sense.

Right now on iOS there is no way to do this. And yes, I've explicitly turned off the cash-back deals notifications in my bank app's settings and that is completely ignored.

Wow. Y’all must be much more tolerant of your time being wasted than i am. One notification from an app I didn’t need/request/expect is cause for deletion. 2-5 per week would be enough to go and rate the app 1/5 on the AppStore and actively recommend everyone I know to delete the app.

> visibility into all of this is poor by design, and getting worse.

Good! I pay Apple big money to protect me (user) from you (abusive app developer, abusive by definition since you talk about my attention as if it were your property)

And the author is also wrong that all notifications on my phone go via Google. Signal and Mastodon notifications are set up via Sunup.

They seem to have given up. Don't do that please...

I also saw elderly people receiving such notifications and not knowing why. Then I realised that this system is designed to abuse the elderly, so I am now totally against it.

Intervening with push notifs could be a good thing. Notifs are approaching the point of uselessness. I turn all off by default now.