I Only Care About The Helpful Notifications, Not The Promotional Ones

Brian Lovin/Hacker NewsI only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional onesalexanderell.isDaily Digest email

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dguo

My rule is: if I get a single notification that I find useless, I'll immediately disable that notification channel (I'm on Android; I'm not sure if iOS has a concept of channel-specific settings) for that app. Even if the channel can include useful notifications, as the article discusses.

If the app doesn't bother to categorize its notifications into channels at all, I turn off its notifications entirely, and I won't turn it back on.

If something is important enough, I can always manually check on it. My attention is too valuable to me to waste it on useless notifications.

I do want more control over my notifications in general. I use Google Apps Script to automatically process/triage my email, and I want to do something similar with notifications. I can probably do so using Tasker, but I haven't gotten around to it.

izacus

> My rule is: if I get a single notification that I find useless, I'll immediately disable that notification channel (I'm on Android; I'm not sure if iOS has a concept of channel-specific settings) for that app. Even if the channel can include useful notifications, as the article discusses.

Well, the developers have started fighting against that by not splitting notifications into channels anymore. Now you just get "General" channel were basic functionality and spam can't be separated.

The modern world of user abuse is great.

throw1230

One strike and you're out rule works perfectly fine for me.

If they think they can abuse my attention with stuff like this, I immediately uninstall and go on with my life.

gpt5

I've been struggling with the Uber app and Uber Eats who has been sending me ads which I found no way to disable.

My problem is that I do want notifications for when my driver has arrived.

JumpCrisscross

> I immediately uninstall and go on with my life

This is sort of like the customer at the gate yelling that they will never fly that airline again. If you’re lost, you’re a sunk cost. Companies should observe those signing off. But more to measure attachment than to make changes to accommodate. (I turn most notifications off.)

xwdv

Have fun not knowing when or where your food is when you order it.

distances

I usually simply uninstall the app on the first clearly spammy notification. Why wouldn't I? It immediately sours the app image.

If it's borderline I will first try silencing the channel like the parent commenter.

izacus

Those rules only work until you're required to have such app installed to do, for example, credit card payments.

josephcsible

If Apple or Google really cared about their users, this is the kind of thing they'd ban, not third-party payment processors.

Gigachad

This is a fight that OS makers need to be in on. Apple added the concept of time critical notifications. It is or should be a tos violation if an app falsely labels spam as time critical.

makeitdouble

I've seen that in a few apps, but worse case scenario you just lose some useful notifications. If it's not a critical app (e.g. my bank), that's a fine trade-off for me.

wodenokoto

My bank mixes ads and notifications. I get things like "Get 20% discount on this supermarket when shopping with your bank visa card this month"

Too

You also get some apps with 20+ channels, adding lots of needless mental burden just to understand exactly what you are disabling.

dismalpedigree

I doubt it is a decision a developer arrived at. More likely some arm twisting by a short sighted and kpi driven product manager.

dredmorbius

That's a good enough reason to nuke the app for me.

xahrepap

I follow the same rule. But I will also then go one star review it.

I will also one-star review any app that prompts me to review it by first asking me if I like it (sneaky sneaky!)

faeriechangling

Lol I do this too. If I see an "are you enjoying our app" banner I will immediately click yes, follow the link to the store, and then immediately 1 star. Even if I enjoy the app and use it daily.

Companies that attempt to filter out negative feedback can pound sand.

sadamhus

Why? If you like it, why not give it a good rating and review if you’re going to take the time. For ratings apps can only present them officially like once or twice a year on apps. So once you rate it, then nothing should bug you again. What’s wrong with companies attempting to get positive feedback from those who like the app. The people who don’t like it, or when there’s one little thing wrong, go out of their way to one start it anyway (like if they have popups that ask you if you like the app even though it addresses the problem you have and that’s why you downloaded it). And if it is free, well, then going out of your way to one star it is a real bummer for that dev trying to make something of value for free and grow via star ratings and having you detract from that. (Unless they are free and collecting and selling all your data - at that point, and if they did this in a shady way although that’s hard to do because of disclosures - I could see giving a low rating review.) just seems overly critical in my opinion but maybe efforts like yours will change dev behavior overall.

karmakaze

I'll go one step farther and uninstall it if I haven't used it recently or often.

weego

I'll go that one step further and cast my phone into a shallow grave, having salted the earth it's buried in so that nothing may grow there again.

hdjjhhvvhga

I'll go one step further and try to bash it whenever I have a chance [0].

[0] Yes Free Now I'm talking about you.

Phlogistique

For some reason I had never thought of doing that.

Thanks, I will do so from now on!

stjohnswarts

Oh yeah I definitely do that with the "rate our app" if I've not so much as done more than open it up lol

Kiro

That sounds harsh. I kindly ask if they want to leave a review to support me in my app. What's wrong with that? Haven't received any complaints and I got a lot of nice reviews I presume I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

thewebcount

What’s wrong with that? It’s fucking irritating. It’s not my job to do marketing for them, and frankly I resent constantly being asked for feedback on every interaction. I bought a lightbulb. Please rate it! I bought toilet paper. Please rate it! It’s like being around a really insecure person who’s constantly trying to win your favor. Just be a good person and it will happen, but try to do it and you make it way worse.

gnicholas

I have a similar rule, but sometimes it's really hard to figure out (1) whether the app distinguishes between different types of notifications, and (2) where the setting is to turn off the new nuisance notification type.

IME, Lyft and Uber are the worst. For Lyft, their notification preferences are buried under "Privacy: Choose what data you share with us". Not the first place anyone would look!

lrem

That's why Android has the system-wide pane for those. No space for (most of) dark patterns. And if someone goes out of their way to "accidentally" mess with that system (oops, this promotion went into the navigation category, silly me), they deserve to go all out silenced.

mynameisvlad

That’s entirely developer decided. Most are starting to recombine channels to get around the feature.

stjohnswarts

Lots of apps make you opt out, but it really isn't that hard to find. Most apps on my phone don't even get the right to notify me. I prefer pull rather than push as far as notices go, unless they're critical like from my bank/CC/gf :)

cuu508

On Android, long-press a notification, then tap on a gear icon. You will see a list of notification categories for that app.

scarface74

You’re assuming that the developer makes such a distinction when they send you a notification

mattlondon

I do this too.

If it is a commercial company (e.g. Starbucks from the article) then I sometimes make a point to act innocent and contact their support people to ask why I am not getting order update notifications after "turning off the ads" or whatever. Hopefully the message will get through.

ComputerGuru

This is also my policy - except:

Uber just sent me a notification to celebrate pride month with Uber (by booking a car??). I don’t see how to turn off these promotional notifications but I need my Uber notifications so I’m aware when my driver is outside. I’m still not sure if I should block all Uber notifications.

davidjfelix

Spoiler - they probably know and don't want to destroy their reliable spam channel. I turn them off and either keep the app open when I've ordered a car, or temporarily turn them back on while ubering and turn them back off when I get a trash notification. This definitely strikes me as one of those comments you see on HN that is wildly impractical at scale, but it's what I do.

shostack

Which is why strict app store policy enforcement is the only way to really end this.

zwegner

You can choose to get text messages instead for ride notifications. I do that and don't get any spam from them.

Still get the stupid "try 1 month free trial" popups whenever I book a ride though, can't see how to turn those off.

aendruk

Gig Car Share used to do this. I patiently responded to each incident with a support request politely asking them to stop the abuse. After a few months of 1:1 mapping from spam incident to customer support issue it eventually stopped.

eastbound

I do the same on the Nespresso site with the “Hey, I’m clippy, do you need help with your order?” covering the “Order” button. I systematically click on it and ask them to order by order. Then they explain how to close the chat, and I click on the next page, the chat opens, I ask them again to go away because I can’t focus while the icon is bouncing in my page.

They don’t answer me anymore.

As in: A corporate employee leaves a chat aside because it’s too annoying.

Ar-Curunir

It’s under the “privacy” in account settings. I just disabled marketing notifications

ComputerGuru

What a place to hide them!

SAI_Peregrinus

I just uninstall such apps until I need them. But I rarely use Uber/Lyft/etc, so it's no hassle to reinstall once or twice a year.

SnowHill9902

Wow that’s cool, did you celebrate? (Block unless you are actively waiting for a car.)

justsomehnguy

> by booking a car??

by hooking a car, of course

*agressive eyebrow movements*

natly

My rule is: Disable notifications immediately regardless, if I find myself wishing I had gotten a ping instead of opening the app to check, I turn it on (which never happens, it's off for everything).

nomilk

Useless notifications is a super dangerous game to play, since one lame "McDonalds has 25% off" *cough: Uber Eats* results in notifications being turned off and poorer outcomes for all parties from that moment on.

lozenge

They are relying on 90% of people not knowing how to get to the notification settings. It's not dangerous, it's A/B tested...

abacadaba

guess im in the 10% of customers they lost. i know how to change settings but still easier to uninstall.

resters

Yes. Especially since the most useless ones seem to come when I’m driving.

Larrikin

I've found that apps that properly set up channels on Android where your can easily block promotional notifications, don't abuse their notifications, and ones that don't put all their notifications through a couple different channels making it impossible to turn off only the ones you don't want. Amazon and Uber are examples of apps that abuse this.

robocat

I install Uber when I need to use it, then deinstall it after pickup. If I forget to deinstall it, Uber kindly send me a notification reminder (random text with with a percent symbol within it), to remind me to deinstall it.

efreak

at least on Android there's no need to completely uninstall it. you can disable the app with force stop; this should allow it to get updates, but shouldn't allow it to run again until you open it manually

abruzzi

this is exactly what I do for most apps-install to use, remove after use. For Uber its easy since I only use Uber when I'm traveling in a country where I don't speak the language (Uber makes hailing rides in a foriegn country easy, though we used Yandex in Russia since Uber wasn't as common.) In some cases, I keep the app, but completely silence it.

aaaaaaaaata

This assumes they don't do anything mefarious on first install.

m.uber.com

wardedVibe

Definitely stealing this idea, thanks

hdjjhhvvhga

I just turned them off altogether. It turned out I can do well without them. If Uber is telling me the driver will be there in 4 minutes, I check my phone in ca. 4 minutes, it's not a big deal. On the other hand, getting a notification I haven't asked for is unacceptable as it steals my time. App creators think it is innocuous, but I have dozens of apps on my phone, and won't tolerate any user-hostile choices.

grose

I've noticed this in social networks as well. If you don't get enough transactional notifications for a while they start making up fake ones like Twitter's "in case you missed this Tweet", Facebook's "[someone] posted for the first time in a while", all the while lighting up the notifications badge. Leads to a "boy who cried wolf" scenario in which I stop trusting notifications entirely and just ignore them, possibly missing out on actual useful ones.

I really wish companies let us turn this kind of thing off, or better yet stopped trying to boost "engagement" numbers by violating your user's trust.

fmajid

That's because the social networks employ armies of industrial psychologists with PhDs who figured out that notifications generate a little squirt of dopamine, and are thus addictive, as opioids are just an approximation thereof. That's why they won't give you an option to turn off notifications, just as they won't let you take control of the ordering of your feed, or offer RSS feeds for it.

There is literally nothing on social networks worth notification. Disable them already.

dredmorbius

I'll hack site CSS to disable any nags.

uBlock Origin's element remover is excellent for this, though I often go directly into CSS using Stylus, a CSS management extension for Firefox and other browsers.

I also don't use any mainstream social media apps.

Mastodon and Diaspora* limit notifications to other users' actions only.

fmajid

Well, I have my browser (Vivaldi) set to automatically block desktop notification requests without even asking (the default is to ask) but as you point out many sites will also show an obnoxious banner and yes, uBlock is a good solution to that.

I'm surprised EasyList lets so many of these through, so I built my own (very few rules for now):

https://majid.info/adblock.txt

kshacker

Funny I mentally read "psychopaths" when you said "psychologists" ... my mind was already set while reading the other comments, and something made me go back and re-read your comment to realize the difference :)

fmajid

Both apply to those who use their knowledge for manipulation and exploitation purposes.

dgellow

Linkedin is just the worst company ever doing stuff like that, I try to disable all their notifications and almost never engage with anything there (and I check the platform maybe 3-4 times a year max), and they continue to try to tell me some people more or less in my network are doing things I never cared about. God I hate this company.

RedGreenBlack

Yeah this has annoyed me for years. They have notifications for literally anything. I keep disabling notification types on LinkedIn and they just keep making new ones up

stjohnswarts

The linkedin website works fine on mobile unless you're a power user or something.

ghostpepper

The weirdest one is the security notification I get in my email whenever I login. I get an email saying Please verify your device - click this link to continue signing in - but I'm already signed in. I've never clicked the link and sign in works correctly anyway.

kevincox

My down folder is full of email from linked in that I gave tried to disable a handful of times and have now given up. How does any of their email still get accepted?

dgellow

> How does any of their email still get accepted?

That’s also something I do not understand. I don’t get how their domain isn’t flagged everywhere with a very bad reputation given the amount of spam they produce.

rapind

Apple kept a notification badge on my settings icon for Apple Pay until I finally went in and opted out of it. Under the guise of “Finish setting up your iPhone”.

It’s not a big deal I guess, but annoying and obviously promotional. Now I partially associate Apple with intentionally annoying.

deergomoo

Apple’s big push into services has been slowly but surely chipping away at the generally pleasant experience of using their platforms. The price of entry was always high, but once you were through the door you were never really upsold.

Not so anymore. Numerous nags in settings to buy AppleCare or start a trial of some service or other. The App Store is particularly egregious: as well as search ads there are now occasional modal prompts to enable marketing notifications with my most hated dark pattern of all—only offering “yes” or “not now” as options.

gopher_space

The entire point of Apple, in my mind, has been their focus on user experience. It's weird seeing them lose their way every now and then. I wonder what's going on internally because no sane designer would sign off on some of these ideas.

The App Store on my iphone is only useful for installing apps I've searched for externally. Browsing categories is buried as a search suggestion?

gnicholas

There's also no way (that I've found) to turn off notifications if you have an Apple Card. It automatically sends you a notification the next day telling you how much you 'saved' via their cash back feature. This actually discourages me from using their card because I hate getting the notifications.

mikestew

You can turn off those notifications, just probably not in the manner you would expect:

https://www.imore.com/how-to-enable-or-disable-apple-card-no...

Which reminds me, I need to get with Apple Card support to find a workaround for the bug where I get notifications for my spouse’s purchases (and vice versa) despite having toggled the switch enough times to have worn a dull spot on the screen. Thankfully we are a couple who don’t really care about the purchases, per se, it is just fucking annoying.

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technothrasher

I don't know if Facebook still does this, as I've completely nuked it from my life, but when I had an account I asked it to turn off all email notifications. But if I didn't log on to Facebook after about two weeks I would get an email saying they were concerned I would miss out and so they helpfully turned email notifications back on for me.

wincy

I didn’t use Facebook for a few years and they sent me a completely fake account security notification. I was super mad about it.

diebeforei485

Sometimes when they created a new feature (eg. Groups), they would email everyone about activity on it even if email notifications were off.

MandieD

Since I couldn't turn off "in case you missed this Tweet," without turning off everything including reply and DM notifications, I no longer get any.

And use it a lot less now, so good job, Twitter!

pmoriarty

This is one thing I actually like on android: you have fine gained control over not only which apps can send notifications but also which kinds of notifications a particular app can send.

So it's usually easy to just turn off all the annoying ones, while keeping the useful ones.

saghm

This started happening enough on the Twitter app for me that I just ended up uninstalling the app. My account still exists, and maybe there are some real notifications there, but it's probably been close to a year since I actually checked.

alpaca128

In the case of Twitter this also permanently broke notifications for my account. It now shows exactly 2 notifications all the time. Both tell me that someone I follow posted a tweet, as if I was too stupid to scroll down the feed myself.

But in return I don't ever get any other notification. The only way to find out whether someone answered my tweet is to manually dig through my own profile.

Needless to say, I don't use Twitter anymore. Because of this, and because 80% of content I saw was just a stream of pure negativity.

theamk

I have a pretty good idea on how to fix this (and many similar) problems: "hibernate app" option. Its a new app state where app icon icon has some mark (like being semi-grayed out) and all the background app services are disabled (tracking, promotional popups, periodic wakeups, etc...). The app is only un-hibernated if user explicitly clicks on it, it cannot do it by itself. The app can be hibernated by long-press menu on app icon or notification.

So the first time you get an ad notify, you click "hibernate" and you are good. And if it is time to make another order, app is woken up, so you cannot miss notifications by accident.

Sure, it is not as good as having separate "show ads" toggle, but it requires no cooperation from app whatsoever,

caleb-troyer

On Android, Shelter (available on F-Droid [0]) is a close implementation of this. Apps installed in the "shelter" (read: Android work profile) can be automatically frozen when not in use, and launcher shortcuts can be created to temporarily unfreeze and use the app. This doesn't require root, and frozen apps cannot run services, send notifications, or anything really. As a bonus, for the most part they don't even show up as installed when frozen and are completely isolated from main profile apps. The filesystem is separate however, but you can use an app that allows file sending via share contexts such as Phone Saver [1] to send files between your main profile and your shelter profile.

[0]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/

[1]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/link.standen.michael.phonesa...

zamadatix

For Android I think the only thing needed for this is for disabled apps to show as grayed out in the launcher instead of hidden. I wonder if that's information available to launchers or only available in the system app menu.

Rebelgecko

On Android, paused apps turn gray on the home screen and in the app drawer. However there's sometimes a delay of ~10 seconds before it happens

zamadatix

Interesting, which launcher is that with? Trebuchet? Using Nova they just disappear for me which is... not exactly convenient for turning them back on lol.

hairofadog

This is a great idea.

tshaddox

I have never looked into Shortcuts on iOS, but I wonder if something similar could be implemented there.

ajolly

Lots of ways to do this on Android. Ice Box is an example of an app that all help do it for you.

aftbit

Ice Box seems to require root fwiw.

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jrockway

Every notification system eventually becomes email. What that means is that we probably need OS-level spam filters so that you can report things as spam. If the notification looks spammy based on the training, it simply won't show up. Marketers think they're reaching you, an army of software engineers remained employed to figure out how to refactor the API to send notifications with the V3 protocol or whatever unnecessary change the OS vendor made this week (driving up every other software engineer's salary; thank you!), but you don't have to be woken up by the latest not-actually-a-very-good-deal.

Whether or not the notification was delivered or blocked by the filter probably shouldn't be fed back to the application, to stave off the inevitable workarounds. But people will test stuff on their own devices and find workarounds. "Your order has arrived! Tap for details." But when you tap it's just an ad. On the other hand, it would be nice for things like Pagerduty to know that all of their notifications were blocked and that they should escalate to the next person on the rotation.

The "mark as spam" data should be fed back to the app stores, and if the app requested status notification privilege and not marketing notification privileges, their app is pulled until they fix it. (Cannot wait to read the whining about that. "I'm just trying to hustle like some blog post from 30 years ago said I should! <crying face emoji>")

In the meantime, I don't really ever turn on app notifications. They usually email me, and what's great about email is I have the Spam folder and the Promotions tab, so I never see most of their communications.

Anunayj

This is a great idea honestly, and definitely possible on android without root, causal search gives me a app that already tries to do this [1]. Though giving notification permission to a closed source app that may send notifications to a remote server for "AI magic" seems bad. If anyone knows of a good open source implementation, be my guest.

There is also this thing on Android Issue tracker [2]

1. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.notificati...

2. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/226161368?pli=1

aembleton

I'd like the ability to whitelist notifications for certain apps by keywords. That way, I might be able to block by default and only allow through those with delivery updates.

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hericium

I wish iOS had some "allow notifications from this app for x minutes" option similar to "share location once".

Uber is a good example of an app I would like to see notifications from, when using their service, but disabled them completely.

Uber abuses this feature to show ad banners for scooters or food when I am not using their app and it's not even open (as in not present on the open applications list).

gnicholas

Uber is one of the worst. You can turn off all notifications unrelated to your existing rides. They hide this in the app under: Settings, Privacy, Notifications. Lyft has the same hidden structure.

hericium

Thanks! Will try it out.

hackernewds

Android let's you disable notifications by category. Since users disable notifications completely, Uber is pretty good at categorizing notifications so you can turn them off.

I still do like promotional offers so I have those redirected to email :)

el-salvador

I've used Uber in several cities, so I get repetitive notifications targeting their different markets. Like irrelevant lunch discounts in other cities.

They also have been sending me notifications for an Argentinan soccer-themed anti harassment campaign every couple of days.

I went through their videos completely and the notification keeps showing. Its done in such a vertical video letterboxed in a horizontal video format that's hard to watch.

ianbutler

I was saying this yesterday, LinkedIn, as an example, sends me the most inane notifications as do many apps trying to steal my time. I pay LinkedIn 100 dollars a month, those notifications should serve me, not the other way around. I really don't care about some low substance content written by someone who I'm neither connected with nor follow.

moritonal

You pay $100 a month for LinkedIn? Unless you're a recruiter I'm really wondering what the value is?

gnicholas

LinkedIn is surely one of the worst. They are constantly creating new categories of notifications, which you have to explicitly opt-out of. Guess what? If I didn't want any platform-initiated notifications (engagement hacks, not based on anyone trying to contact me or interacting with my content), then I probably don't want this new invented category of notification.

TedShiller

I haven't been on LinkedIn for 15 years and it hasn't affected my career at all. Most people don't realize that you actually don't need LinkedIn.

hackernewds

Counterpoint anecdata, I was unemployed for a year, and got my first job interview the first week I set up LinkedIn. Stayed there 6 years and has led to my subsequent career.

I dont believe you need LinkedIn premium at $60/month though

ENGNR

I noticed the same thing recently, I got a notification "there are xxx awaiting your attention!" and as a joke dared my product focused co-founder to open it and count how much useless crap was there. We were not disappointed. LinkedIn - this is some seriously brand destroying shit but thanks for the laughs

rlpb

I deleted my LinkedIn account many years ago because of unwanted notifications and an inability to disable them.

I haven't missed it.

seqizz

Imho, Linkedin is one of the apps (for non-recruiters ofc) you can just remove. Once-a-month visit to bulk-delete copy-pasted offers is more than enough.

b112

I was on the fence about a premium account, but thanks for this info.

kmonsen

What's the draw of premium? Cannot see anything there that would be more then marginal useful for me.

Nextgrid

It's completely useless, don't waste your time. The UI is just as slow & terrible, all the dark patterns and ads are still there even if you pay.

b112

They claim all sorts of wondrous benefits, and have a free trial.

Figured I'd try it and see, but not if it is going to be an abusive relationship.

DoctorDabadedoo

You're able to directly message people that are not your friends and see who saw your profile (no matter their privacy configuration, I believe). For me that's about it. Useful if you are job hunting, but nothing to go crazy over.

Honestly, the only thing keeping me on LinkedIn is FOMO of that spectacular job that a recruiter might reach out about, but reality is that this doesn't happen at all for positions worth their salt.

gnicholas

I believe if you do too many searches in a month they force you onto premium.

aembleton

Do you really need notifications at all from linked in? Couldn't you just open the app a couple of times a day to check for messages.

pronik

I have a somewhat similar gripe about apps, which has some recent implications: there seems to be some school of thought for engagement, which suggests that something that's not used at least weekly is useless. For this reason Google started automatically removing permissions from apps I didn't use for some time and it's also suggested I could delete them "to save space" which is frankly quite stupid -- I have quite a lot of apps which I only intend to use when needed, but I need them installed and ready. A perfect example are emergency apps -- I do not intend for my car to break down every couple of weeks, but when it does, I need the emergency services app. I don't want to open the desaster warning app consciously, but I want it to warn me when something happens, be it today or in three years. Don't judge the app by its daily usage time please.

hiq

I think that's indeed the default behavior, but when I go to a certain app permissions, I have an option "remove permissions and free up space", if I untick this I expect the permissions to stay in place, is that not the case?

twic

Sadly, features aren't added to Android because they're good for users, they're added because they'll look good in someone's promotion packet.

NullPrefix

Well whoever came up with this crap needs to be demoted

dahart

In email land, the terms for helpful vs promotional are "transactional email" for the helpful stuff (e.g., https://mailchimp.com/help/about-transactional-email/) and "marketing email" for the promotional ones.

There are channels to report abuse if it's bad, not to mention just leaving reviews and mentioning why.

floren

Expedia is really bad about calling all their promotions "transactional emails". You see, once upon a time in the distant past, I used Expedia, so based on that transaction surely I care deeply about how "A more rewarding travel experience is coming in February": http://jfloren.net/content/expedia.png

kmod

I'm not sure of the bindingness of this page [1], but the FTC says that transactional-vs-promotional is determined by what what a recipient "reasonably interpret[s]" it as, not what the sender says it is. Not that this prevents the kind of abuse that you mention, but I find if I send a email responding to the kind of email you mention and I politely explain how it is a violation of CAN-SPAM and if reported is a five-figure fine per email, then I magically get added to some sort of "do not send promotional emails that we call transactional" opt-out.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...

gifnamething

Google is similar!

Google helpfully emailed me to let me know that my storage is 70% full.

...as it was when they emailed me two months ago, and four months ago, and six months ago...

Essentially, they get to pass off an email advertising Google Drive/Google One/who cares as an emergency transactional email, pretending that I'm close to running out of space. Can't block it or I'd be blocking everything from Google. I can try to filter it but they keep changing the wording. Evil and intentional.

webmobdev

Had similar ideas - I share the author's frustration in India, the delivery apps and banking apps are the worst culprits.

I wonder if the regulators can be asked to extend the "Do Not Call" registry to include barring such app notifications? For example, the National Do Not Call Registry in my country has now been renamed to National Customer Preference Register (NCPR). This now gives indians more fine-grained options to choose what kind of marketing calls we want to bar or receive:

> “Transactional message” means a message triggered by a transaction performed by the subscriber, who is also the sender’s customer, provided such a message is sent within 30 minutes of the transaction being performed and is directly related to it. Provided that the transaction may be a banking transaction, delivery of OTP, purchase of goods or services, etc. ... “Unsolicited commercial communication or UCC” means any commercial communication that is neither as per the consent nor as per registered preference(s) of recipient, but shall not include: (i)Any transactional message or transactional voice call ...

Source: TRAI regulation - https://trai.gov.in/sites/default/files/DraftUCCRegulation29...

They can extend this to mobile OS notifications and ask Google, Apple, Samsung etc. (mobile OS makers) to ensure that all promotional messages through such notifications are blocked, and only "transactional messages" are allowed.

shostack

I'm sad that phone notifications aren't in the same category of governance as email. The promotional vs transactional requirement could be used to good effect here with opt out and CAN-SPAM legislation.

diebeforei485

Apple has lost the moral high ground because they decided to spam everyone with notifications for revenue-generating services like Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple TV+ etc in order to increase their services revenue.

This also means they can't effectively enforce App Store guideline 4.5.4, which says: ... Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI...

wodenokoto

I agree.

One of the reasons why Apple says they need a walled garden approach is to ensure that we don't get spammed with promotional push notifications.

So if they aren't protecting users, and are themselves sending us promotions, then they have one less argument for a walled garden app store approach.

rutierut

As someone who travels a bit I’ve got quite some food delivery and ride share apps on my phone. The marketing notifications are driving me crazy, I regularly miss relevant notifications because Grab, Uber, Uber Eats, Glovo, Bolt, and Cabify are all sending me almost daily notifications with some sort of cringe content trying to nudge me to take a cab/order food. Especially Uber Eats and Glovo are bad.

clumpthump

It's definitely annoying that users can't opt-in only to the types of notifications they want on installation, but Uber and Uber Eats are not guilty of what Starbucks is doing in the article (at least on Android); you can disable all notifications besides "Taking a Ride" and "Your Order" notifications.

aembleton

Disable notifications for them. It's not a perfect solution but it will make your life calmer. Just re enable them when you need to use Über or on Android just disable the promotional notifications

frederikvs

If an app gives me spammy promotional notifications, it either A) gets uninstalled (if I don't particularly care about the app), B) gets a 1-star review with a clear comment about the notifications, or C) all of the above.

The app I use to pay for parking spots suddenly gave me a notification once, apparently to try and get me to park my car more often or something. I gave it a one-star review, never saw one of those notifications again :-) (Which reminds me, I should revise that review.)

alkonaut

The problem is with businesses that are in some other business than the app business. For example the coffee business. It doesn't matter how good/bad the app is, usually the app wasn't why you chose their business, it was location, quality of a product etc. And it's their app or no app.

aembleton

Can't you just disable notifications for the app? If you're on android you might just be able to disable the promotional notifications.

frederikvs

Yes, disabling promotional notifications is an option - except if the app developer applies the dark pattern described in the article. But even when it works, the app developer just goes on their merry way, annoying other people too. I believe it's better to send a signal, and educate developers about what we as users want.

fmajid

Heh. I was woken up by an Uber greenwashing marketing notification. All notifications off (and in any case if I am waiting for a Uber I have the app on waiting for the countdown and I don't need the notifications anyway). If there were a viable competitor to them where I live, I would have deleted the app altogether and given them a 1-star rating.

Apple's policies ban the use of push notifications for marketing purposes, but they don't enforce it nor do they provide a way for customers to report violation, so that policy is completely useless.

deergomoo

> Apple's policies ban the use of push notifications for marketing purposes

Not anymore, this was rolled back a year or two ago unfortunately. About the same time Apple themselves started using push notifications for marketing.

mawif

I think the relevant rule is section 4.5.4 of the App Store Review Guidelines:

> 4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

So the language is weaker, but it should still be possible to disable marketing notifications.

(Edit to add: and I report apps that don't provide that option, citing the above. So far, doing so hasn't achieved anything though.)

fmajid

I hadn't noticed, thanks for letting us now. Very poor decision (both rolling back the policy and spamming us with push notifications).Daily Digest email

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