[RANT] App Notifications are TERRIBLE
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
1,121 words · ~5 min read
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so you know what really steams my buns app notifications i mean okay sure you
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want to know when you get an angry email from your boss or when someone on
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twitter responded to one of your hot takes but why does a game that i hardly
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ever play think that it's okay to send me a dozen reminders every day to inform
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me that i hardly ever play it i mean weren't notifications designed to be
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useful back in 2003 blackberry started pushing
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out emails so that you wouldn't have to keep checking your messages over and
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over to see if you had anything important to deal with and that was a
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godsend so you would think that the likes of google and apple would have
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found a way to keep the original spirit of the push notification alive
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but this is 2019 where even cat underwear
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can be monetized so of course developers decided that push notifications would be
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a great way not to let us know when something important was happening but
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rather to maintain a constant presence in our minds and therefore our
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wallets and it's having a real world impact
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app and notification fatigue are real things now did you know that according
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to one survey over 70 percent of users
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said that six or more notifications from one app in a week would cause them to
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stop using that app altogether but nevertheless developers think it's a
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great idea to keep shoving more and more notifications down our throats i mean
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is there an emptier feeling than seeing your phone light up with a tinder
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notification thinking someone might finally be interested just to find out
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they're trying to sell you more crappy features you don't need
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not that i would know anything about that of course anyway not only do app
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developers keep sending you notifications because more eyeballs on
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their apps means more money but the people running the big app marketplaces
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so that's the aforementioned apple and google they really have no incentive to
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stop the avalanche of garbage showing up at the top of our screens because why
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would they not only do google and apple take a cut
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when you buy a premium app they also take 30 percent of the money that you
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spend on in-app purchases so more screen time increases the likelihood that
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you'll buy more like gold coins for that stupid tile matching
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game that you love so much and then even if you don't do that it makes it more
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likely that you'll engage with their own paid or ad supported services and what
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better way to ensure that we are all staring at our screens like a bunch of
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brainless sheep than to have our phones chirp at us with notifications all the
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time now to be fair there are ways to turn off notifications for problematic
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apps and you can do it here on Android and here on iOS but for goodness sake
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there has to be a better way to do this
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other than us wasting time that we could spend doing literally anything else
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digging through menus and disabling notifications one at a time or
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even worse trying to figure out Android's confusing new notification
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category system now individual apps also allow you to
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alter these settings but like social media platforms for example are
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notorious for having such an endless amount of customization in their
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notification menus that it is nearly impossible to disable the spam you don't
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want without accidentally missing something important so many users just
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end up leaving it on now i really don't think it would be
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that hard for google and apple with their billions of dollars to realize
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that people do remove irritating apps and also to develop an algorithm to
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separate out the unimportant stuff from the good stuff i mean google literally
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did this for your gmail inbox already and then probably the craziest part of
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all this for me is that while i can understand the motivation for stuffing
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more spam down our throats what is up with the apps that failed to deliver the
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notifications we ask for why is it that my chat app will neglect to send me
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pings for two hours then hit me with all of them at once when i happen to open it
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or what about youtube's brilliant strategy of picking and choosing which
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channels to bother informing me about a new video from i mean i clicked
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subscribe i actually want to hear about it unfortunately right now other than
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training in notification blocker foo
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i don't have a great solution for you but stay tuned because here at Linus
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media group we are hard at work on the techwiki freemium notification blocker
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app every time a notification comes through it'll read it send that data
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back to our servers then send you a notification announcing that the
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notification has been blocked and if that sounds good you're wrong that
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