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This is a personal opinion, but I'm actually really glad Apple are dragging their feet on this.

I absolutely despise presumptious software that feels entitled to my attention as and when it chooses. I have my browser set up to wholesale reject all push notifications, I don't let the vast majority of my apps send me push notifications, and any application that feels entitled to pollute my inbox (email already has an awful signal/noise ratio as a communications medium) with useless email alerts gets uninstalled or unsubcribed from immediately. Frankly browser notifications should never have been a thing, it's just another varient of the spamdemic that plagues the modern software landscape. I'll look at your software when I choose, and if the software starts dictating that it gets removed or silenced without exception. I honestly don't understand how most people stay sane with their phones and laptops pinging and flashing away like a pinball machine all day.

3 comments

Firefox doesn't allow site for even asking permission to notify you without some good reason. It's only Chrome (as always) that doesn't care about your well being. If you want respect, drop the unrespecting relationships. (And yes, complain the hell out of it and ask for Google's head, because they deserve it, but act too.)

Push notifications are extremely useful for a few niche applications. Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Push notifications allow me to spend less time on my phone/PC.

Without them, I would have to regularly check the app of interest for any important updates, losing both time and mental space with another thing to keep in the back of my mind.

Thanks to push notifications, I can defer interacting with the app to when it's actually relevant.

Also as I argued in another comment [1], web notifications are simply better than native app ones. Push notifications are here to stay, the choice is in the implementation, not whether they'll become culturally accepted or not (they already are, iOS users simple are nagged to install native apps to have them).

What updates are actually important though? A good 80% of notifications I'd get before I started systematically disabling them by default weren't important at all, they were just pointless nagware trying to get me to engage with the software more frequently so some analytics manager can justify why they shouldn't be sacked that quarter. It doesn't matter to these people that most of the extra clicks and presses are people telling them to piss off so they can get on with actually important work, they only care that engagement is going up. Proper tail wagging the dog bullshit.

Excessive notifications are a dark pattern which needs to be resisted, not encouraged. I'll continue blocking every single one of them and looking at apps on my own schedule, I will not allow random software to interrupt my flow because it thinks it has a right to my attention. Littering is culturally accepted too, but that doesn't mean either littering or its digital equivalent should be.

I agree and am of the same opinion, i’m glad Safari is playing by a slower tune and it definitely it isn’t google’s tune.

You don't want to be given the choice? Nobody is saying notifications should be silently accepted.

If google could move as fast as they could they'd serve their own interest at the expense of others and we know where that leads us. I'm glad that they can't move as fast and it takes a while for things to get accepted.

You're not wrong, there's real upsides to push notifications. For example the thing I love about the iWatch is how it lets me never check my phone because anything relevent is pushed to the watch.

But I think you are really underselling the downsides of push notifications. They are easily the most heavily abused feature of the modern web anywhere they exist. If every single app responsibly used push notifications then sure, it would be great. Here in reality push notifications aren't some personal majordomo making sure only important issues are brought to our attention, push notifications feel more like walking down the Vegas strip having leaflets constantly shoved in your face.

I think its premature to say that we have the answer and just maybe Apple dragging their feet on this will help us find a solution that is better than the advertiser friendly free for all that Google is pushing.

> push notifications feel more like walking down the Vegas strip having leaflets constantly shoved in your face.

Strong agreement here.

There's a significant (single digit %) of sites I run into that ask me to accept push notifications or ask for my email before any of the content loads. I usually close the tab when that happens.

I guess there’s a benefit of not having to take out your phone to check notifications but in the end they do compete for your attention and microdisrupt you anyway. And how many notifications on average are you willing to take in? I personally want as little as possible, the most important contacts and critical alerts are enough for me, the rest can wait till I check for them myself.

Yep and this is where it gets wierd. Maybe I should be allowed to assign priorities to different notifications and then have my phone automatically proritize what makes a "ding" based on the time of day or my geographic location. Maybe notifications should be throttled in some way so that every 30 minutes I receive a digest of notifications if there are any. Maybe they should be aggrigated till I have 5 accoumulated. Or maybe these are all terrible ideas because they require configuration and users aren't going to spend the time configuring their notifications.

This whole thing really goes to the different mindsets of Apple/iOS and Google/Android fans. The Apple camp is fine waiting for functionality to get something that is decently thought out, the Google camp wants everything now and will deal with the consequences later. We've seen this repeated with copy/paste and with background processes on both platforms. Android got there first, but the earliest Android implementations had serious limitations and issues.

> “Maybe I should be allowed to assign priorities to different notifications and then have my phone automatically proritize what makes a "ding" based on the time of day or my geographic location. Maybe notifications should be throttled in some way so that every 30 minutes I receive a digest of notifications if there are any. Maybe they should be aggrigated till I have 5 accoumulated. Or maybe these are all terrible ideas because they require configuration and users aren't going to spend the time configuring their notifications.”

If you haven’t tried it already, you may be interested in iOS 15’s new “Focus” feature set. Even tackles that last point on set up.

I simply solve that problem by having most notifications be silent. Only urgent ones (calls, text messages from a select group of people) are effectively "push" notifications. The rest buffers until I get to looking at my phone.

This is where Apple's paternalistic view takes over. I think Apple's design view is that you the user shouldn't have to take action to protect yourself from sties abusing this feature, the Google view is that it's a free for all. There are merits to both approach and I wish users of both platforms would understand that.

Notifications on all Android browsers I've tried are opt-in.

On the subject of notifications in general, Apple lets their users be spammed more by not adding granular notification categories like on Android.

Your comment doesn't reflect reality. If Apple took notification curation seriously like you imply, I would seriously consider switching to their smartphones, but they don't.

> This is where Apple's paternalistic view takes over. … There are merits to both approach…

Isn’t it generally accepted by both small children and adults that having a Dad is better than not?

Sure, teenagers rebel for a while against anyone caring about them, but they tend to grow back out of that as soon as they have to parent too.

I don't feel like that at all because on all of my devices, notifications are opt-in. I get notifications for services I want to receive notifications from (mostly IM).

The exception to this are services which trick you into accepting their notifications because they are beneficial to the experience while using them (ride hailing and delivery apps), and then use the same channels to spam you with marketing (Uber, ...). For those I simply chose to disable notifications altogether and instead let the drivers call me if I'm ever late.

E-mail fits that description better, because you almost always have to give out your address to register (even with Google SSO & co), which is then used for spam and you have to opt-out after the fact.

> I don't feel like that at all because on all of my devices, notifications are opt-in. I get notifications for services I use (mostly IM).

They aren't granular though, you either opt in to all or you get none. This is particularly annoying when you're using something like LetGo or OfferUp, because you basically need to opt in to receive messages from people interested in buying your second-hand stuff. But once you do, they take the opportunity to spam you with engagement boosting ads querying you if you have anything you want to list or telling you "we've selected these sales for you."

It's an extremely unpleasant design pattern for anyone who values their own time and attention.

>This is a personal opinion, but I'm actually really glad Apple are dragging their feet on this.

>I have my browser set up to wholesale reject all push notifications

I am struggling to understand the reasoning here. You don't like feature X but fortunately there is a configuration to turn it off. But you would still like it taken away from everybody else?

Perhaps I am misrepresenting your position, could you clarify?

I don't want to normalise endless notification spam, which is what having this feature in Google's advertiser-friendly conception of it available ultimately does. I'm already considered a bit strange my by friends for muting all group chats and disallowing notifications for things, we don't need to entrench this appalling social norm any further.

I find the idea that everyone should be instantly available at the click of the fingers to their friends, colleagues, managers, and crapware on their phones absolutely revolting. Push notifications are just interruptions as a service, out of band communications like that should only ever be used for important things but they just get endlessly abused as a form of spam in practice. The advertising industry already has enough tendrils to pry its way into our lives, I'd deprive it of yet another if it were up to me.

Isn't that what Apple's iOS notifications already do?

What's the justification for allowing it for a certain class of apps, but disallowing it for another class of apps, where the difference between the 2 categories of apps are just the technical infrastructure on which they are based?

It's a difference in philosophy for the most part. Google are an advertising company first and foremost, they'll do whatever is best for the advertising industry and to Google allowing every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the web to shove notifications in people's faces is great. Apple take a more paternalistic view, they see that push notifications in the browser as a feature that's often abused and so remove it entirely as to protect their user experience from annoying behaviour that's outside of Apple's direct control. Notifications originating from apps in the App Store in theory can be vetted much more closely and removed if they're deemed to be spammy.

Neither is intrinsically right and I think it's good that there's choice, what's winding me up is this idea that everyone should adopt the Google model unquestioningly as though Google are a standard unto themselves. I'm very much in the Apple camp, but it's not out of any love for Apple and more that I don't like the advertising industry and want to keep it as far away from my life as I realistically can. To me push notifications are like popups in the '00s, yes there's legitimate uses in limited cases but abuse is so widespread I'm going to treat every one as guilty until proven innocent.

There is a huge difference that you can turn off a feature A which might be very useful feature for many and you can't even enable the feature A because money. This case is about the latter..

I think depriving users of that functionality is more than worth it if it also deprives the advertising industry of yet another way to make everyone's life worse.

Thanks for your clarification, I understand your reasoning now