So the author both wants notifications and doesn’t want notifications.
Got it.
Sure sounds like a problem of their own making. And I find iOS’s notification taming rather simple to use. So I use it, and amazingly I have less notifications because of it!
I realized at somepoint I was ignoring everything on my phone because of the number of notifications. Now I disable EVERYTHING and only leave important stuff. I wish this was the default.
I did the same many months ago, though I suspect I may need to redo as I've been getting some really long notification piles when I don't check my phone for a day...
Apps that I do allow notifications: when they become annoying I go to the notification, long hold > settings > notification categories. If they only have one category and don't let me fine tune then I don't need that app or just don't need notifications from it. Back to settings I have other ways to customize that can make them less annoying like silence them.
I don't really have any issues with it. Samsung has very fine-grained controls and most apps I simply don't grant notification permissions at all. Also I put every single chat group in Whatsapp, Telegram etc on Mute by default which helps a lot against overload.
By the way, I give it a year or so by when phones can run a local AI to automatically filter the notifications you're interested in.
Yeah I feel like they neglected to show how much more of a problem on iOS this is than Android.
On Android apps typically have their push notifications divided into different types and can almost always turn off the marketing notifications for an app while leaving the important ones on.
I dont see even half of these notifications on Android.
On Android apps typically have their push notifications divided into different types and can almost always turn off the marketing notifications for an app while leaving the important ones on.
Oh, iOS doesn't have this? I didn't realise. Android has had this for a good few releases now and I love that.
For Android users Buzzkill is also great for apps that don't have granular enough notification settings. You can set up rules to make it automatically dismiss the notifications you don't want to see.
I do a similar thing, enabling only the apps I want notifications, and I run "adb shell settings put global heads_up_notifications_enabled 0" to stop those annoying popups interrupting me. This should have been an option available in the configs, imo.
I actually like these popups, but only if they're coming from notifications that I actually want to see. But it's really weird that the option to turn them off is only accessible via adb, even iOS has this feature.
My rule has always been people can notify me, but bots/apps cannot. If I see a notification not from a person, it gets disabled. If it's something I can practically do on a website, I don't download the app.
True, not a personal human action though. I pretty much always want to see messages from people, but most of the time don't care about stream notifications
The Amazon app, which for many years has faithfully executed its legitimate role as an app that helps me order stuff and track those orders, recently sent me a notification to let me know it thinks I might like some JBL headphones.
I'm not sure about on iOS, on android if you long press on any notification and go to disable it there are a bunch of toggleable notification categories
I used to do this but it ended up in me missing notifications I actually cared about
The best solution is as someone else mentioned, just mute apps that send obnoxious notifications when you see them
Different notification sounds for different kinds of notifications has been big as well, one for messages, a different one for twitch streams, and another for everything else that normally gets ignored
I have a simple rule. If I install an app and it shows me any notification I don't want to see, I immediately block it from having permission to do that.
At least Android also proactively asks them whether to disable notifications for an app if they always swipe them away, or if they haven't used the app in a long time.
If something's going to try to grab my attention, it had better be worth my while. I block as many notifications as I can, both on my phone and my computer. I also try to avoid using apps for things unless I have to.
Both on Android, and iOS, opting out of notifications solves most of the problems. You can do all on your own time without constant nagging, and leave notifications on for the communication channels you really need.
However, what I hate with passion are shopping and delivery apps that suffer with disabled notifications (I don’t know when things arrive, and that would ideally be good to know within seconds), but enabled notifications mean that there would be a lot of spam notifications about ordering and buying more.
AliExpress is the worst at this. Which category should I disable? AliExpress, aliexpress, Chat or message push? And even if I figured it out, there's no way to stop store spammers from sending you useless messages constantly, detracting from actual sellers with questions.
On android long press a notification and it'll show you which category of notification it is from that app, with the ability to disable just that one category if desired. E.g. advertisements and feedback reminders
