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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?
It hurts!
love is just extroverted narcissism
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
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?
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.
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).
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.
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."
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.
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.
Protip #2: Nothing involving money enters my phone. No banking apps, no credit card apps, no NFC payments, nothing. Saves a whole lot of hassle if my phone ever decides to disappear, fail or explode (not necessarily in that order).
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
No he's normal. He just spies through his neighbor's windows now.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
At least on Android, you can forcibly disable the notifications on the OS level per-app. This will prevent an app from presenting a notification regardless of any in-app settings.
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.........
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.
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
... and then aren't able to turn it off again, and then write an article about it? Sure, makes sense.
Clickbait anyone?
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.
Protip #2: Nothing involving money enters my phone. No banking apps, no credit card apps, no NFC payments, nothing. Saves a whole lot of hassle if my phone ever decides to disappear, fail or explode (not necessarily in that order).
Protip #4: No money enters my wallet. No cash. No credit cards. No blank checks. Nothing. Saves a whole lot of hassle if my wallet ever decides to disappear, get lost, or stolen.
Protip #5: No person ever enters my car. No friends. No family. Not even myself. Nobody. Saves a whole lot of hassle if my car ever breaks down.
There's a "deny" button for a reason.
Though I've never figured out why they bothered to include an "allow" button...
People see me as the odd one that worries about the power of Facebook, that does not have WhatsApp installed, that does not see the point of Twitter when we have RSS... I wish you luck in your future dumbphone aka feature phone live! I heard the Nokia 3310 did a came back, in case you are interested.
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.
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.