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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.

3 comments

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