Install app. Start app. “Allow notifications?” No.
Does iOS not do this?
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.
My second proposal — and this is a wild one — is that promotional notifications should just not be allowed. Or you can opt in to them if you desperately want to hear from the Starbucks app every single day, but you should have to go out of your way to do that and should not be the default behavior when you choose “allow notifications.” Just an idea!
The author calls out the Starbucks app here, but doesn’t mention how blatantly dark-patterned its notifications really are. Android allows apps to set up multiple notification channels, so you can selectively prioritize (or, more often, mute or block) notifications based on their content. Starbucks uses this feature… to create a single channel called “Promotions & order status”. You wanted to know when your order’s ready? Fuck you and your concentration, get double stars today!
I appreciate the notification controls Android gives me, and I use them aggressively. If an app pushes a notification that doesn’t actually require my attention, I block that channel, and if it does it again, I block notifications for the whole app. I agree with the author, though: I shouldn’t need to do that.
The use of a single channel should be against the rules for commerce apps.
They’d probably get around that by having a ‘Promotions and Order status’ channel and a random / unused one like an ‘App update available’ channel. Promotional notifications should just really be banned.
Email subscriptions also sometimes have that, with bonus points for several vague and similar sounding categories, and emails not mentioning what category they’re in.
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.
Same… Have done for ages now. Don’t know how anyone puts up with the default behaviour.
The default now is that apps have to first request notification permissions, on both iOS and Android.
Most users are blindly accepting any and all requests by apps.
Yeah but that’s really their problem. I mean, the OS literally asks them to allow it. What more can you do?
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.
But don’t you want to open this website in our app so that we can better track you?
God I hate reddits mobile website, especially when you try to view an nsfw post
Swap the “www” in the url for “old”. Desktop site but it doesn’t stop you viewing NSFW content.
Just abandon the site altogether. They do have good content but they’re user hostile.
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.
This except for twitch streams
That’s a human action anyway though… Not a “it’s been a while since you opened our app time to drag you back” notification
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
