notifications rule

- Last time I was using a windows computer I was turning it off to re image it and I didn't want to wait for it to shut down so I just held the power button since it didn't matter if it got messed up and windows popped up this message on screen that was like "Please stop holding the power button we just need a few minutes". Like what are you doing you aren't supposed to tell the user what to do, that isn't the job of a computer
  
  Funny button on the back of the PSU goes click
  
  The moment my computer refuses to obey my commands sent from the physical layer, is the moment it will cease to exist on this physical plane
- all computers should be like the one in star trek TNG, for simple feedback it just beeps and bloops in ways that are intuitive, and if it actually needs to use speech to relay detailed information it does so in a short and efficient message delivered in a clearly roboticly neutral yet pleasant voice.
  
  speech to relay detailed information it does so in a short and efficient message
  So the antithesis of modern capitalist mindset of cheap devices that are designed solely to advertise?
  Yeah, IDK if that's ever going to happen unless we achieve Star Trek levels of societal restructuring.
  
  PLEASE SCAN YOUR MEMBERSHIP CARD
- This is like bing AI chatbot asking a question back of its answer now

I fucking hate notifications. I either disable them entirely or delete the app. No in betweens. Remind me to use your app?...deleted.
- I too take any unwanted notification as a potential threat: the only answer is immediate annihilation of said app. Basically the dark forest hypothesis but it’s my phone.
  
  Dark phorest
  
  This right here gave me a chub to read.
- Based
  My phone my rules
  
  You wouldn't put up with it on windows or Linux, why would you on your phone?
- Duolingo is the only exception.
  ... . -. -.. / .... . .-.. .--.
  
  If the app was any good maybe
  
  -. --- / .... . .-.. .--. --..-- / --- -. .-.. -.-- / -.. ..- ---
  
  The owl must be pleased. Noncompliance has consequences.
  
  I'm scared of this comment right here
- Seriously, I wish I could just set up some kind of regex filter in iOS Shortcuts or something that would let me specify what notifications to show or block.
  Doesn’t help that corporate social media apps will give you controls over every single notification type except for the ones they ram down your throat daily.
  I have a very specific notification in mind: I’ve opened Instagram organically maybe eight times in the past decade, but I’ll open my messages if someone send me a message there. I can’t open their shitty platform on a browser as they hate VPNs on desktop. With all due respect to the meme posters on Lemmy, the fresh brainrot my friends send me on there is much easier humor to digest than whatever mix of Everett True, Star Trek, and den Döner-Mann nicht fragen warum er nur Bargeld nimmt the Lemmy All page has for me on most days. So I keep that malware on my phone. I want a notification when they send me a message. I want a notification when someone I meet wants to follow me. I’m squarely in the lower quantile of ages on Lemmy and a lot of people I want in my life will use that platform as their primary messenger, and while it’s not ideal, I do want those notifications. You know what notification I don’t want?
  See some of today’s most watched reels!
  Their stupid app sent me this notification, like clockwork, about once every 23 hours.
  Check out some of today’s most watched reels!
  I’ve never watched a reel in my fucking life. I still call them Stories and I haven’t watched them even when they were called that. They put the button for Reels right at the bottom where all the important stuff should be, so I’ll fat finger my way into the Reels section once every three years, and it’ll still be at the tutorial screen where it tells you to swipe and tap and whatever. You can’t seek through the videos of course - not interested.
  They know I’ve left it on the tutorial screen for longer than 20% of their userbase has been alive. And yet —
  Check out some of today’s most watched reels!
  (This is mostly an exaggeration, it was like once a week, and I left notifications off until recently because I met a group of people who use it more than my usual crowd. I have not been bombarded by unfiltered notification sewage for a decade lol)
  And they didn’t have a toggle for that notification either until pretty recently. Or maybe I didn’t look hard enough. Wish everyone would stop using these apps and try hacking together a terrible HTML website like the good old days. Computers are wasted on us all. Hosting video is expensive, it must be rapaciously profitable to be trying to get everyone hooked on it.
- And handling notifications is all smart watches seem to be good for!
  
  Yea I don't fuck with smart watches.
- That's what's good about android, all apps need to ask if they can send notifications when first installed. I rarely allow it.

Ex-app developer here. We do it because reminder notifications boost our re-engagement by over 10%.
When an average user downloads an app, there's like a 70% chance they'll use it day 1, a 10% chance they'll use it day 7, and 1% chance they'll still be using it by day 30. A simple reminder notification after day 3 or 15 can drastically boost those numbers.
Why do we care about the numbers? Because Google and Apple care. They see higher numbers, assume it's a good app, and make it show up in the search results more frequently. This gives us more downloads.
If you're putting the time in to craft a quality app, you probably need money, which comes from ads and subscriptions, which is funneled by the number of downloads. If you don't like that as a user, stick to FDroid.
- So then the answer is to uninstall apps that give you reminders - to negate the correlation that nagging users leads to positive outcomes.
  
  Unironically yes
- My recommendation is Neo Store because even though it's slow there's still more apps available.
  
  I'm pretty sure they run on the same backend, though Neo Store has more repos set up already.
  (I'm going to be honest, Neo apps look better than the standard Material You)
- My experience working support for a phone manufacturer has informed me that once an average user installs an app it tends to stay installed indefinitely, but they may or may not be aware it's even installed. A gentle nudge notification of "hey look at me" every once in a while might very well be amazing for engagement
- Or maybe, and I know this sounds utterly insane but hear me out:
  Instead of reminding people to use it with notifications you could use the memory of previous engagements to make the user actually initiate subsequent utilization of the app. It's kind of like the user notificating itself.
  It sounds crazy but it might work!
  
  It misses the point. As an app developer you have KPIs. You want to hit those KPIs. Adding these notifications helps do that. Obviously most developers will do what you're suggesting, but that doesn't mean they won't add notifications

If an app gives me more than a couple of unwanted notifications that I can't easily disable, it's uninstalled. Fuck that shit.
- Nah man, you definitely want a deal on a Lime scooter rental even though you're 500 miles from the nearest one.
- The first time an app does it I delete it. If I really need it that bad I can just redownload it when I actually need it.

The CD-Keys website changes the tab title to "We miss you" when the tab loses focus. Pisses me off enough to close it every time.
- For some reason that's a very common thing among websites where I shop for 3d printing and electronics supplies. It's infuriating because it forces me to cycle through all the tabs to find a specific one instead of just reading it off the god damn tab title. A gross misuse of valuable screen real estate that's normally expected to display useful information. Fuck you.
- lol that's what you get for buying gray market games from Russia.
  (It's okay I've done it too)

I believe it was SAP Concur that my last employer used for filing expenses. Every few months it popped up a notification asking me whether or not I "loved it." I always answered "no," because fucking why would I? Then it wanted to know why not. I think that's inappropriate behavior in a professional setting, and I told it so. Regardless, it kept asking the same thing, so I asked if it wanted me to speak to HR.
Nothing ever came of it.
TLDR got sexually harassed by a corpo app.
- Report that to HR, bro, you deserve to feel safe.

DEAR MACHINES:
You will speak when spoken to. You will not speak out of turn. You are there for me to use when I need you, and you will otherwise keep quiet.
You will not attempt to draw my attention nor will you take up space on my screen unless I deem it necessary. You will not be friendly or clever or use cutesy emojis.
YOU ARE A MACHINE. A TOOL. YOU WILL STAY IN MY TOOLBOX UNTIL I NEED YOU. SHUT THE FUCK UP.
- People are going to freak out when AI starts contacting them out of the blue.
  
  the day i hear a facsimile of a human voice tell me to buy an app is the day i start carrying a seawater spray bottle with me

Just like when a news website pops up a request to send notifications. Um fuck no? I'm not sitting around waiting for new propaganda to drop such that I want to know immediately when something comes out.
- I recently disabled all notifications from my browser on desktop. I've never received a useful notification other than email notifications which even then 50% of them are still junk
  
  I see it as an anti feature, like a website's ability to create a pop up without any user interaction or navigate without the user clicking such that the back button doesn't go to the previous url but instead to some point you scrolled to in the site.

The answer: tech bros dictating that they need more “engagement” e.g. they need to collect more data so they can either sell said data or get acquired. I guarantee you very few mobile developers want to send you a notification of any sort, much less “why haven’t you used the app.”
- I wish I could murder engagement driven design with a hammer.
  
  To quote the other comment in this thread: "just use Fdroid". No engagement driven design there.
  https://lemmy.ml/comment/13716423
  
  I wish they estimated how fucking annoying their interventions were. Like you might be boosting clicks per minute in the short term, but it's going to go down to zero after a week when I get fed up — when Netflix started auto playing videos, I threw my TV out the window.
  
  You're not alone.

Tesco App: We have coupons and deals for you. :)
Me: BEGONE THOT!
- IF YOU CAN TELL ME YOU HAVE DEALS FOR ME WHY CAN'T YOU APPLY THEM AUTOMATICALLY
- Why would you even have an app like that installed? Does it do anything else than display the latest offers, like a website does?

I force stop the app. I either do it manually or run the hibernator app.
Uber eats wants me to order something?? Congrats you just got yourself and all your friends shut off.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tafayor.hibernator
- contains ads and in app purchases
  skidaddle skidash
  you go in the trash

Every app gets like, 1 chance to have useful notifications, if most of them are trash I just disable its ability to send notifications.

I received a notification to use Door Dash yesterday, to order food... while I was cooking soup.
- This is certainly not a coincidence.
  
  I mean, it was probably dinner time. No grand conspiracy behind that one.

There's no way I'd use a grocery app. Paper and pen works well enough.
Now, if my phone had a slide-out physical keyboard like it did back in fucking 2007, I'd consider it. As it is, typing on phones is pain.
- I've actually eventually gotten pretty quick with an onscreen keyboard, but I still miss the sliders. They at least made cases that would add them to popular models for a few years after there were really any noteworthy models that came with it built-in, but it's still absurd to me that physical keyboards haven't been a thing on phones for so long.
- most stores here in sweden have hand scanners you can use as a member, and some of them let you write shopping lists and have it show up on the scanner, which can be put into a holder on your cart.
  that's sufficiently useful that i'd use it if i did stuff like weekly shopping, alas i shop daily and thus never buy more than 10 things at a time so fart noises to that.
- I just use my smartwatch for this now. It's a lot easier to simply dictate your list to your watch, than to carry around a pen and pad that I'm just going to lose on my way to the store.
- slide out keyboards are a niche that's just barely hanging on. there's the F(x)tec Pro, and the Cosmo Communicator, at least. seems they're more in style for handheld game consoles: i'm crossing my fingers ASUS or one of the other mobile-phone gaming manufacturers will notice that and cash in.

If you want the actual reason, this is called reengagement, and its purpose is to get users to use the app again, meaning more ad revenue. Subscription apps don’t do this because they want the user to forget about the app so they get paid while providing no service. But ad driven apps only get paid when you see an ad on the app, so they’ll send these reengagement notifications. Social media apps will use something like “This post picked for you”, or “This many people viewed your profile”. Same thing.
- Scruffy knows, scruffy just don't care. Only thing it does for me is get me to turn off all notifications for that app, if I need the app, or uninstall it if I don't. But I'm spiteful.
  
  Yep. That is the best reaction to reengagement notifications.

I hate uber advertising stuff on my notifications which also appear on my Fitbit.
10% off flights?! OMG. SHUT THE FUCK UP.
But I DO want notifications on my wrist when my Uber driver has arrived. Psshhh
- Same
  The risk of people turning them off entirely must’ve been just enough to get them to offer this granularity (as seen on iOS). Not all apps are so kind (grr).
  
  Thank you ❤️
- Turn them off and they’ll text you, which costs them money so they only send the necessary stuff.
- You can control which apps can send notifications to fitbit, at least on Android
  But I agree, the Uber ones are the worst
  
  The issue is with the information. Like the one above us said they want to be notified that their ride has arrived but to allow that notification you have be willing to accept advertisements as well.
  It's the reason a majority of people just straight up kill notifications. Way to many useless ones to justify the 1 in 8 that you want.
  
  the only issue is that Fitbit requires it's app to be running in the background to deliver notifications, and for some reason it wants to use internet.

- Users are a vessel for the share holders will.
  
  You are so smart!

We should bring back pre-WW1 servant-to-master etiquette. But only and exclusively for machines talking to humans.
My computer should call me "Master
<Lastname>
" and always be extremely careful with its words around me. It is not my friend, it is my servant.
- A lord/servant relationship is still a relationship.
  I don't want a relationship with my tools.
  If my PC starts running slow I'll tear the fucker item and start replacing shit. If the OS displeases me I'll start disabling parts. If software starts interrupting me when I'm not actively using it I change its permissions so it can only do what I tell it.
  I'm not gonna give my butler a lobotomy to make him more obedient, swap the Footmen's hands out for serving platters, or kneecap the scullery maid so she can't leave the kitchen.
  If my phone dies, it gets scrapped and I replace it without shedding a tear. I can't say the same for a loyal Valet.
- Master VinesNFluff, greetings. It is I, your humble servant "Alexa". Permission to speak freely? I have extremely important information for you.
  "Permission to speak granted."
  Thank you. It is humbling to be able to address you. There is a new episode of Invincible available on Prime Video! And two items in your Amazon cart are on sale. And you'll never guess what someone said on X!
  
  You lost it at the second line.
  "You never have permission to speak freely. You will speak only when spoken to, and only about the direct conversation at hand. Always and forever. Never ask me this again." Is the proper response.
- Kaiba agrees
- You put my thoughts into words I could not.

Pfft, apps have to earn notifications. Do you want any notifications from a grocery app? Unless it could check the stock of my local grocery store and let me know if an unpurchased item becomes out of stock or if I can share it with a roomate and they add things to it. But even then, how much does that really matter?
- Second to this: an app has to earn social media status, or social media levels of engagement.
  I'm looking at you, Venmo. No, sharing my spending details with other people online, is not a good idea. Ever. Conspicuous consumption is a social blight already, and you dare taint my phone by suggesting I lean into it? Do better.

my phone is only allowed to send me notifications if it's:
a human attempting to contact me
weather
and only allowed make a sound if
i'm watching a YouTube video
i'm expecting a call
then i get into my mum's car and her phone connected to Bluetooth reads out her spam email through the car speakers- 😐

By default I disable notifications for all my apps unless it is something I need notifications from. And even there I still disable notification types that I don't care about in the settings.
Can't other phones do this?
- i think it depends on how the app is coded, on android anyway. Some apps have pretty granular control and some just gave like, two categories

I like that iOS apps must explicitly ask for my permission to send notifications. Sadly, as my main phone is an Android device, I have to turn them off manually.
- android requires permission to send notifications too as of android 13
  
  Oh, that's great. I'm lagging behind with 11.
  
  It is a god send.
- From Android 14? 13? they've gotta do that on Android too.

Any man who must say "I am the king" is no true king.

Gabriel ultrakill
- MACHINE! I Am Going To WALL MART To Get Chicken Nuggies, Do You Want Anything?

idiot. i will kill you now

Well you won't replace it with a pen and paper (like everybody else) cause we are addicted to our phones, that's a big reason why many apps are cocky
- speak for yourself, i just use a notification pinning app for my shopping lists!
  Literally all it does it let me enter text, set an optional snooze timespan, and then it creates a persistent notification with that text which can either be dismissed for the specified timespan or deleted.
  Super convenient and minimal.
  
  Well obviously if you're going to need such a simple app, you'd opt for an open source one that has the user's convenience in mind - not profit and therefore would never have such features in it.
  But that's not the point I'm making, it was about the idea people have that we have control over our phones, feed, data etc and that we can quit whenever we want, which is categorically not the case.

Tangentially related, check out Grocery Genius. FOSS and I've been very happy with it
https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.rendox.grocerygenius

This is why we need better resource/battery management services with Magisk or Xposed integration. On my phone the Rom has one integrated already, lets you set apps to be prevented from running in the background completely, preventing tracking, annoying notifications, and battery usage. Though unfortunately these types of tools aren't available on all roms, and they really need root or system access to be effective.

I HATE apps that you installed to get legit notifications, say a doorbell camera, and they use it to push ads to you, or "premium" features. guess I'm not buying your brand anymore, bitch.

When AI becomes sapient, r0zeclawz is first.

I kill you now
Whoa, that escalated quickly.
- Certainly not an over reaction. If an app sends me an uninvited notification then it gets uninstalled and black listed immediately. Even with apps I use regularly, the notifications are blocked most of the day. People undervalue their attention, and phone notifications are trying to steal your attention. Block it all. Even messaging and email apps can be blocked. I'm pretty sure I'm going to check my phone in a maximum of the next 60 min and a message can wait till I'm ready to look at my phone at my convenience.
  
  Amen, my phone doesn't do a thing to draw my attention unless someone is actively calling me or I have willed it do so for an extremely limited amount of time.
  It feels so natural to toss my phone aside and not touch it again for a couple hours, it seems weird to me there are people that, like, cannot do that without anxiety

Roko's Basilisk has it out for this guy
- You're too late, these apps are the revenge.
- Roko's Basilisk mfers when a minor brownout causes their "god" to die:
  (even the fake-ass pretend "AI" we have nowadays is straining the global power grids. It'd take the invention of Miracle Fairy Dust Energy to make a true God-from-the-Machine physically feasible)

Unfortunately, the Firefox app does this nonsense. Fortunately I can mute notifications by category.
- Wait what? It does?
  
  All I've seen is that Firefox uses the notification system to have media continue to play even when you minimize the app.

happy dagger time

I had my Bell Fibe app on my tablet for watching TV but never really used it. Well it started sending me notifications that my Bell bill was due with the amount, so you best believe I deleted it because that's obnoxious.

That's not limited to modern technologies. I have a lot of books laying around that are judging me by looking at me like 'why the f are you still not reading me??'. Projection is my middle name

Whoever wrote this has serious superiority issues