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Push Notifications From Popular Apps Are Becoming Increasingly Useless And Annoying (wired.com)
David Pierce, writing for Wired: Push notifications are ruining my life. Yours too, I bet. Download more than a few apps and the notifications become a non-stop, cacophonous waterfall of nonsense. Here's just part of an afternoon on my phone:
"Hi David! We found new Crown jewels and Bottle caps Pins for you!"
"Everyone's talking about Bill Nye's new book, Everything All at Once. Read a free sample."
"Alex just posted for the first time in a while."
I get notifications when an acquaintance comments on a stranger's Facebook posts, when shows I don't care about come to Netflix, and every single day at 6 PM when the crossword puzzle becomes available. Recently, I got a buzz from my close personal friends at Yelp. "We found a hot new business for you," it said. I opened the notification, on the off chance that Yelp had finally found the hot new business I've been waiting for. It did not. So I closed Yelp, stared into space for a second, and then opened Instagram. Productivity over. Over the last few years, there's been an increasingly loud call for a re-evaluation of the relationship between humans and smartphones. For all the good that phones do, their grip on our eyes, ears, and thoughts creates real and serious problems. "I know when I take [technology] away from my kids what happens," Tony Fadell, a former senior VP at Apple who helped invent both the iPod and the iPhone, said in a recent interview. "They literally feel like you're tearing a piece of their person away from them. They get emotional about it, very emotional. They go through withdrawal for two to three days." Smartphones aren't the problem. It's all the buzzing and dinging, endlessly calling for your attention.
"Hi David! We found new Crown jewels and Bottle caps Pins for you!"
"Everyone's talking about Bill Nye's new book, Everything All at Once. Read a free sample."
"Alex just posted for the first time in a while."
I get notifications when an acquaintance comments on a stranger's Facebook posts, when shows I don't care about come to Netflix, and every single day at 6 PM when the crossword puzzle becomes available. Recently, I got a buzz from my close personal friends at Yelp. "We found a hot new business for you," it said. I opened the notification, on the off chance that Yelp had finally found the hot new business I've been waiting for. It did not. So I closed Yelp, stared into space for a second, and then opened Instagram. Productivity over. Over the last few years, there's been an increasingly loud call for a re-evaluation of the relationship between humans and smartphones. For all the good that phones do, their grip on our eyes, ears, and thoughts creates real and serious problems. "I know when I take [technology] away from my kids what happens," Tony Fadell, a former senior VP at Apple who helped invent both the iPod and the iPhone, said in a recent interview. "They literally feel like you're tearing a piece of their person away from them. They get emotional about it, very emotional. They go through withdrawal for two to three days." Smartphones aren't the problem. It's all the buzzing and dinging, endlessly calling for your attention.
Use your phone solely as a pull thing. Turn off auto-sync for your emails too. You don't need to respond in seconds. It's an email.
Then, your phone interrupts you only when you want it to.
first post?
They Abuse, They Loose.
It hurts!
love is just extroverted narcissism
Protip: turn notifications off in the OS settings. Problem solved.
The only notification I have set is for my credit card and bank account, for whenever a purchase is made or money is drawn. Everything else is unimportant.
Turn them the fuck off and stop whining about it.
The only ones I need are messaging and email. Everything else is on pull.
Twinstiq, game news
... for ruining the Internet by forcing it down the throats of the more-than-willing "average people", who WILL ruin *anything* they sink their claws into. I no longer enjoy the Internet in any way, as the stupidity is now way beyond what is tolerable.
Settings > Notifications There isn't much reason to leave most of that on, especially if it is hurting your productivity. You don't leave the sound effect for a new email message on, do you?
Smartphones are making me HATE technology, and humans in general.
Nobody's making you use the Facebook app. You can just as well go to the Facebook webpage in your web browser. (A tip: messaging works from the mobile browser if you go to mbasic.facebook.com) I presume the same is true with most other apps, like Yelp or Reddit, which have web pages. Not only is this better for your sanity, but it minimizes the prying these companies can do into your private information.
The vast majority of push notifications were useless and annoying from the very beginning. That's why I disable all of them by default.
Android phone.
Hold on the notification.
Block all notifications.
Never hear from that program again.
I haven't yet allowed one app except those that actually NEED to inform me (e.g. a mail app) and even there, I paid for TouchDown so I could put on working-hours to turn off work-email notifications when I just don't care about them (i.e. outside of work days/hours) - maybe the default mail app does it now, but it didn't years ago when I bought TouchDown.
And if a program doesn't allow me to fine-tune notifications so I get spammed with "product updates" when all I want is the message my friend sent me? I just uninstall the app and - usually - use their website instead.
In the same way that the telephone is the rudest device known to man (ANSWER ME NOW, ANSWER ME NOW, I'M GOING TO KEEP RINGING, ANSWER ME NOW), notifications are the spam of the modern era.
Turn them off. How to do so on an iPhone/iPad? Don't ask me but surely there's a was as simple as the above.
"UNWANTED NOTIFICATION!" - hold finger on it, say "Fuck off" (purely for frustration venting), turn off app's permission to ever post a notification again.
Oh, and stop installing dozens of apps for unnecessary shit that you could just use the website (again - same thing, never allowed a "desktop notification" in my life on a browser).
And it's not the gun that's the problem...It's all those bullets whizzing every which way.
Just click no. Problem solved!
No one is making you accept the push notifications. In most cases, the user is explicitly allowing them at each app install. Most users are just horrible sysadmins.
I only get push notifications from my email and calendar and it works for me.
I don't allow any push notifications at all. Life is wonderful. I don't care what their marketing people have to say.
I just disable notifications for apps that annoy me. I don't have this philosophical crisis.
my rotary phone does not push does not pull
Modern app appers use app appifications!
Apps!
Bill Nye - "Useless and Annoying" - Fo' sure!. Alton Brown is a better scientist than he is.
This guy was a douche in Seattle 20 years ago and now he a useless tool nationwide. ESAD!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
I haven't been there in a long time, so maybe this is old stuff, but whatever they did with their layout is awful, and renders the site essentially unreadable for me.
When every site you go to wants you to subscribe to notifications for whatever stupid reason?
Simple. Turn off app notifications.
Maybe if you don't have your phone beeping and buzzing at you ever time someone posts about their latest starbucks latte purchase you will pay more attention to the world around you and look up more often.
Sounds like your phone belongs to everyone else. It's easy to run through your apps and disable notifications. I have notifications enabled for phone calls and text messages. That's mostly it, with few other allowances for Google Maps or my financial apps. The only annoyances are apps that don't let you fine tune which notifications you get from within the app. I like to know when a payment is required, but not when new services are being offered.
Most of those apps don't seem to care that much if what they're notifying you about is actually useful to you. I know it's anecdotal, but rarely do I get a notification from Facebook about a friend's activity that actually matters to me. Instead, they're interested in maximizing the amount of time you spend with their app open, so they can track more of your activity and serve up more advertising to you.
I remember when Facebook created the news feed about ten years ago. People denounced it as creepy and many said they were considering deleting their accounts. Most of them didn't do it, and Facebook has proceeded to get worse. Instead of stopping at a chronological list of activity by friends and followed accounts, they now serve up push notifications. That means that, absent sufficient privacy settings, your activity could be pushed out to people you're not friends with because one of your friends commented on it or liked it. Over time, people's expectations of privacy have continually been rolled back. Facebook has a history of removing privacy invading features (like making some profile information public) in response to outrage, then implementing them again a few months later once the outrage has subsided.
Just yesterday, I saw a commercial from Match promoting a new feature that allows people to see what other Match members have been nearby recently. That seems incredibly creepy because it potentially exposes people's locations to complete strangers. And in this case, it actually defeats the supposed purpose of Match. They're supposed to use profile information to try to find people who are most likely to be compatible with them. However, being in proximity to someone has nothing to do with being compatible. It does, however, increase the amount of time that people have the app open, even if it's creepy and not especially useful. However, as long as people don't delete their accounts, privacy will continue to be rolled back. Eventually this will become the norm and people will accept it unless they take substantial actions to protect their privacy.
Gravity still makes things fall down.
Air still required to live.
People with the ability to advertise to you still doing that even if you're not interested.
I am unimpressed with this as news.
That's why I use the built-in notification blocker in Android.
There are very few apps that I actually want to see notifications from. Like Fallout Shelter "A deal on..." BLOCKED. Tapatalk "Blank has just posted in..." BLOCKED. Heck, my file manager decided to pop up a push notification for some garbage BLOCKED.
Do that a and your troubles will melt away. I get notifications for my gmail account, not my other two accounts. I get notifications for text and Hangouts, but nothing from FB, etc.
People that complain about too much push are probably too lazy to be bothered or don't know if you swipe the notification sideways partially on Android, you can click the little gear that appears and block or silence notifications from that app.
I'm sure iPhones have a way to deal with this, too.
Helps to only install apps one really needs. Most free apps are adware with unwanted extras. Limiting permissions can help, but not much unless the app requires nearly none.
Also, every app is a potential time-bomb waiting to happen. A seemingly legit, stable app today can become something else after an update. While setting updates to manual may help provide time to vet, and limit updates, it's not fool-proof. Some apps may silently update their own code internally without downloading an update.
Apps, on iOS at least, need to get permission before they can send you push notifications. I only grant permission to apps that I actually want to get push notifications from. No game would ever need it, but mail, twitter, etc? Sure, they can have it.
I get zero push notifications from apps. Zero. None. It was not that difficult to turn them all off. You probably could have done it in the same amount of time you took to write about them. Just another instance of complaining vs doing.
If only it was as easy to suppress annoying and useless articles on /. as it is on a phone, none of us would be rolling are eyes at this article right now. Wired Magazine: it's still 2007, right?
Disable notifications in your apps. Most apps work fine in the mobile browser unless they force you to use the app in which case I no longer use the site/app (looking at you, Yelp) Also, battery saver mode is a quick way to make the phone quit update checks that lead to push notifications, I almost always have it on when I'm not at home.
Fuck Ajit Pai
Push notifications are ruining my life. Yours too, I bet.
You lose your bet. I don't give the apps permission to send push notifications. It's really that simple.
The first thing I do is turn them off at the OS level, with very few exceptions. New app? If I forget, it reminds me to turn them off! No worries about finding it in the preferences of the installed software, the OS is always in the same place.
Almost every other comment here says the same thing. Are there actually people that need to read this? Is it not that obvious?
Turn off background refresh for 90% of your apps. My data usage dropped from 2GB per month (my data cap) to 1GB. A lot of apps don't need to be on cellular when I'm away from my home wifi network.
I control my phone so that I only get Buzz'd or Dinged when someone is trying to directly contact me. I use a different tone for e-mail, so I don't reach for spam messages. But every time an app buzzes my phone, I hold down the notification, and disable them. There are only a few I cannot be turned off (I am looking at YOU SAMSUNG PAY) aside from that, the only noises are ones that are "urgent". My phone is for my convenience. It is not convenient to look at my phone to find baloney. Just turn it them all off.
And if you have a modern smart phone, Einstein.....you can switch the permissions to annoy you with push notifications OFF.
In fact, pretty much every app I've ever installed right off to bat, asked if I would allow push permissions, to which I clicked NO....
How did the guy that submitted this story MISS such a trivial thing...?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
After the invention of micro payments, I don't play games anymore on my phone or tablet as they have destroyed the gameplay. So I don't install many "app" these days.
But when an app pulls a stunt like that, I either block it or delete it. Endomondo started sending me a notification every Saturday morning that I should check how my week went in terms of exercise. I use that app so after it had done that twice, it lost it's privilege to interrupt me.
I noticed that Facebook and Twitter wanted to train me to check them out all the time, so if it hadn't used the app in 48 hours, they would ping me with a "[someone] posted [something]". What people had posted, wasn't directed at me or I wasn't even tagged, so they got blocked. I have since then deleted those accounts all tougher since their usefulness as a messaging system were negated by the fact that turning that off also meant that I wouldn't get messages that was directed to me.
Finally my phone has been cleansed of many games that I once played but had forgotten about. Apparently they had embraced the micro payment world and had new features bolted on. The first time they ping me, they promptly get deleted.
Then blames the phone for it. Even if you get notices for all sorts of things, if you care about your productivity it takes a glance to determine if the notice matters at all to you. If it doesn't, right back to work. If it does, see what it's about, close the phone, back to work. This concept that if the phone demands your attention you are forced to step away from whatever you are doing for hours at a time is something that just baffles me, yet it's so pervasive that I get weird looks when my phone buzzes and I ignore it during a face-to-face conversation.
It's OK. The phone won't gets its feelings hurt if you ignore it. And guess what? Those notices will remain on the screen until you have a moment to view them. I have yet to get any notices, outside of human contact notices (wife texts saying she has a flat or something) that are time critical. Learn to manage your phone instead of letting your phone manage you. It really isn't that difficult.
Think about this before installing random apps in your phone and give it all sorts of permissions.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This isn't a real problem. Just don't turn it on. Issue avoided.
If/when you sign up to 100 different services, most of which are useless to you from a 'notification' point of view (like you 'need to know about a hot new business'?) what do you expect? Delete the app or turn that shit off, take control of your life, don't expect some semi-automated, likely totally unintelligent 'AI' to run your life for you.
Those began to wake up and see their favourite platform is lacking at best.
Obviously some people allow push, out of curiosity, and then regret. You dingus.
Yelp app? WTF? Are you serious? Why would anyone install such a thing on his computer? (Yes, your phone is a computer.)
If I want to find a restaurant, I just open my web browser, type "ye", it fills the rest, and I am at the yelp web site where I can search for restaurants all I want.
I do not want your crappy app.
He're a better solution, since you're such a fucking idiot. Put your phone in a table-vice and crank it down until it's nothing but powder; repeat with your balls.
There's a lot of comments recommending that users disable notifications for apps. Unfortunately, this is a rather simplistic way of looking at it.
I became particularly frustrated with the ASDA groceries app (ASDA is a supermarket chain in the UK, owned by Walmart). They send push notifications to advise on order status, expected delivery time, etc. However, they also send push notifications simply to advise that xyz product is discounted this week.
Very happy to receive the first kind of notification, not so happy to receive the promotional messages. There is no way to select the type of notifications that I'm happy to receive (confirmed with ASDA directly).
Companies aren't allowed to adopt an all-or-nothing approach with text messages or emails or even phone calls / letters (data protection laws in UK/Europe). I'm honestly not sure of the legal position around in-app notifications, but it's certainly frustrating that many organisations don't allow users to filter the types of notifications sent.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Realize that if your phone dies or explodes, your money still exists! That's because your money (physical and virtual) isn't actually physically in your phone. I know!!!!
If your phone explodes, you can still access your money via an ATM, going to the actual bank, connecting to the banks website via computer or smashing your piggy bank.
after a year of owning a smartphone i am ready to go back to a dumbphone that cant not do anything other than phone calls & text and voice mail, i refuse to allow applications from the google playstore turn my phone in to a god damned advertising platform, i just dont install anything on it anymore, i wiped off all third party apps except for just a few that play nice, and when this phone craps out i am going back to a dumbphone (*no more smartphones)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Push notifications are ruining my life. Yours too, I bet.
Nope, not mine. If you install a bunch of garbage apps what do you expect?
At least on Android (probably iOS too) you can silence notifications from any app. Why are we talking about this?
... and then aren't able to turn it off again, and then write an article about it? Sure, makes sense.
Clickbait anyone?
Slow down and move to the south. Stress can kill you, you know!
That's a great solution if you are a smart user with a dumbphone. However, the problem we have here is a smartphone with a dumb user.
You are missing the point.
The CONTENT of the popups are useless, not that people can't dismiss them.
READ: Advertisements bring ZERO VALUE.
E-mail used to be very useful until people started to abuse it with unsolicited advertising. Now we see this with push notifications. If I get a weather app to give me notifications on severe weather in the area then I expect only that kind of notification. When it starts to give me notifications on sales for umbrellas and boots then the notifications become an annoyance instead of a useful tool.
Turning off notifications doesn't help, because that means stopping the notifications I don't want as well as the ones I do. I've already seen a lot of posts mocking this since disabling them is a simple solution but it's not. I want control of what notifications I get and if the people making the push notifications cannot be honest about the notifications then they become meaningless.
I want notifications for things *I* see as important. If *I* can't get that control then *YOU* (the person offering the notifications) can't use them at all. Not only do *YOU* not get to use them but you create the expectation that they will be abused by other people. Since *YOU* can't seem to control yourself then nobody gets to use it.
It seems push notifications got killed even before people made them useful. Good job people, you threw the baby out with the bathwater, and then ran the baby over with a lawnmower.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Someone should do a research paper on the productivity of modern workers in a regular environment vs government/military employees working in a classified office. One thing you should almost never find in a SCIF is a cellphone (rare exceptions exist) with all the distractions it can bring. Heck, in some you won't even find many computers able to reach the regular internet!
I love technology, I really do, but sometimes it makes me want to go back to using cassette tapes for music and actual physical books for reading so I don't have to deal with all the stupid ding dong crap they think they can push on me and seem to believe won't make me the least bit irritated. Silence is golden, too bad companies don't seem to realize that.
OP: Stop whinging. You signed up for it. Live with it. If you do not like it, DO NOT EFFING INSTALL said apps.
People are fucking morons with too much pointless shit on their devices. 5 years with a smartphone and I've never had problems with push notifications getting to be too much to deal with.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
I know, eh?
Oh, btw, sometimes my phone rings. It's so annoying! I demand that they stop making these things that make sounds and annoy me!
duhh....
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
My first initiation with the Internet started at work in 1996. I installed one of those "push" apps not knowing at the time. It didn't stay on the computer very long - too disruptive. Pretty soon the company was remotely disabling them because the advertising traffic was racking up mileage (and $$$) on the network pipes. The experience was so unpleasant that I vowed never to install any "push" app on any device.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Some of us are old enough to remember when Internet Explorer brought out "Push" technology and how it sucked. Seems to such even worse this time around.
I have notifications for most apps off, but some dont allow fine tuning. Say you want to be notified of messages in some app but enabling that also allows them to notify you about their 15 other apps youre sure to love.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
I kinda want to take the bet they offered in the summary. I don't even know where my phone is. I think I left it in the car. I don't tend to carry it with me. I have no apps other than what came with it. It does push email, I think.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Funny, "Becoming Increasingly Useless And Annoying" were exactly my thoughts on tech news, due to articles like this.
PointCast?
... but from what I can tell they were already 100% annoying 99.9% of the time roughly 3 weeks into the first smartphone introducing them. I have only a few apps allowed to do this and even services that one would deem intelligent (like Google itself) pester me with stuff I'm not interested in - such as traffic and weather in a city 3000 Kilometers away that I left this morning.
Bottom line: Not really news this tidbit.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
and complaining about all the products that you don't want to buy.
When an app gets on my nerves with notifications I just ground them. On my phone newly installed apps have to ask anyway if they should be allowed to throw notifications at me and the usual answer is no.
Sorry for being sensible about that.
What. The. Shit. In the amount of time it took Joe Blow to write this, he could've turned them all off. Here's a life tip: when a useless app asks to send you pushes, DENY IT. Fuck.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I don't know about iphone, but for Android this is dead simple to do: Long press on the notification, tap block, tap done. The app still works as normal, just no notifications.
The problem is that most apps are useless wrappers around websites. It's simple: Don't install apps. I have maybe 5 apps on my phone. Everything else I need to do with the phone is accessed through the browser. Problem solved. If a website has a poor mobile experience and tells me to "download their app" instead I know it's just wanting to mine my data and annoy me. The solution is simple: Go to another website.
I would honestly be fine if my phone only had one app: The browser. It can check the weather, translate to foreign languages, look up stock prices, open my gate, and find a place to eat.
What's the big deal? About the third time that I get an unwanted and irrelevant push notification, I unsubscribe to that mailing list. It takes a while to whittle it all down, but it is possible to have your life back.
Switch them all off.
The only notifications I get now are calendar reminders and messages sent directly to me, either via SMS or the few messaging apps I use. Every other notification is switched off completely. Yes, even e-mail and Facebook.
It's the only way to stay sane.
Eat the rich.
remember those little annoying things. The smartphone has taken it's place. "Reply to me", "watch me", "tell me this and that"
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
Surely there is no way anybody would actually click something when the summary is that stupid. That's what these new guys don't get.
I recently followed up with a job posting for a fairly senior position in Iowa that was listed on LinkedIn. For obvious reasons I don't apply for jobs from work computers but use a personal tablet. First, every time I access LinkedIn from my tablet it tries to get me to install the app.
Then it turns out the job posting that was listed as an "Easy Apply" actually routed you through to ZipRecruiter. I've heard their ads but this is my first experience with them. You have to jump through multiple hoops to actually apply for a job. Turned out even though I thought I had applied, I really hadn't. I'd filled out the pages but two days later got an email "Are you going to actually apply?" which was a day after an email stating the company was no longer taking applications. Every page tried to push their app on me "so they could keep me informed of my progress and other opportunities".
When I didn't take the app I got bombarded with emails. First email was "Hey we're checking our algorithm and matched you to this job, is it a good fit?" The job they matched me to was the one I applied to originally.
Then I started getting emails from various other people "Hey, you matched this job" where the match wasn't to my skills or experience level, the only thing about the job was it was also in Iowa. So I've had to "unsubscribe" to multiple ZipRecruiter mailing lists to stop the emails.
I can only imagine how intrusive their app must be if their email lists are that bad.
every app I install that does notifications I have to opt-in/agree to receive the notifications in the first place, AFAIK the only apps that are come with notifications turned on are the stock ones that you'd expect, text msgs app, email app, etc.
There are plenty other wrong things with apps.
I killed with fire recently Youtube (in FF, I can kill youtube ads by ad blocker, in the app I can't), Linkedin. I would have killed all Amazon apps but it seems that they have been pre-installed. Everything that has a website needs to go. All the small conveniences they do are not worth it.
There are exceptions though. My bank app is actually quite good.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Is the author aware that when the little popup appears the first time you run an app and asks if you'd like to allow notifications from the app, you don't have to accept that, right? Only a small number of my apps are allowed to send push notifications. A messaging app? Sure. A game? Nope.
Jesus Christ it takes a few seconds to turn them off dude!
It was timely for me because up until the last say week or so, I had not been getting enough notifications to bother, but now they have crossed the line with me = OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!
I just went through and disabled a bunch of them.
Step one: Find the in-app option to turn off push notifications.
Step two: Not there? Leave a one star review in the app/play store, stating the reason.
Step three: Disable push notifications for the app in the Android/iPhone OS.
PS. The lowest scum of the earth apps will remind you every time you start them "your push notification settings seem to be turned off".
Viber (what's-app-type messaging app, popular in some countries): you suck. The sooner you die and my friends and family stop using you the better.
Become a social media dropout like me - your notifications will most likely drop and life will be much simpler and happier - at least it has for me :) Not sure if this is an option for most millennials, they are hard-wired for this type of constant distraction in life.