If I get so much as one unsolicited alert from an app, I disable notifications on it immediately. I've been doing this from the very first days I had a smartphone, in 2013 or so.
My reserves of attention are limited and extremely important for accomplishing my own goals. Nobody gets to draw from the reservoir without my consent if I can help it.
And thank goodness tech still lets me help it! I just have to pray that nobody figures out how many hundreds of billions of dollars Google or Apple need to be paid to make it impossible for me to silence notifications.
I have disabled absolutely everthing my phone will let me disable. I allow only my own calendar/reminders, and messages from people in my contact list. Everything else is silenced or denied.
One thing I've noticed apps doing is they will now build native looking notification request popups. When you open the app you will see a window that looks just like the iOS notification window asking if you want to show notifications, if you click yes then you get the "official" notifications window.
They do this because if you click no on the "official" window, Apple will not let the app request notifications again, but if you click no on the app's version, they can keep asking you again and again.
IMHO Apple needs to start cracking down on these shady notification UI's
I've never had a news app "alert" that did anything positive for me ... never.
News sites are websites I visit when I want, that's it.
1) Everything beeps now. Phones, cars, machines etc. It gets a bit much and I just turn things off
2) On computers, so many notifications pop up and block elements of an interface. Popup that blocks what i'm reading. Popup that blocks system clock. Everything that piles up in bottom right. There are times where I have to close 2 things to get to the thing I want. I disable as many as I can.
3) Requests from websites about notification. I'm just about to read something and then all of a sudden i'm asked if I want to enable notifications.
4) Constantly asked to change default settings. This is not your default X, would you like to make it default X.
My god. I went back to non-smart watches, physical books, I unsubscribe and turn off notifications.
Bad behavior risks being punished for bad behavior. Nothing to see here.
My news app is my browser. It gives me unified access to all (free) news outlets, of which there is an abundance. It also has a killer feature where it doesn't even offer to send notifications.
I turned off all news notifications on November 4, 2024 and haven't regretted it once.
Why would you need news notifications anyway? If something catastrophic is going on and I need to act, I'll get an alert on my phone via cell broadcast.
I only want immediate notifications for messages from people I know, or dangerous situations in proximity to my location. I have never once wanted my phone to buzz to tell me about general breaking news.
What would be useful is to be able to set up my phone to keep low-priority notifications in a digest for later viewing with a buzz and an icon at set times of the day if there's anything in there.
Any breaking news that is urgent enough for an alert happens to also be something a friend would text me about. Case in point, the assassination attempt in Butler PA last year.
No other “breaking news” has been relevant enough for me to reenable notifications. I check the news periodically enough as it is. That covers me wanting to know about anything interesting.
As soon as notifications started being (inevitably) used for advertisements, they started getting disabled on my phone. The most insidious are those that you want for order status for something like food delivery, then they get leveraged into ads a few days later ("It's Taco Tuesday! Order from your favorite Mexican restaurants!").
Push notifications definitely would benefit from more granular controls. Tagging alerts like discount notifications you didn't set up as something separate for instance. I don't trust some AI classification over an explicit API.
Steve Jobs once said that privacy is knowing what you sign up for. Feels like push notifications deserve the same treatment.
"Make the pry bar chocolate flavored" suggests chairman of the shoving down throat committee.
Apps like DoorDash and Uber have notifications turned off on my device. They bypass most notification settings Apple offers and within the app you can't turn off certain notification types... so completely turned off.
Getting distracted at random times during the day _is_ fatiguing. Try putting phone away in another room when focusing on something, focus without distraction is a super power!
Never had a news app so
Apple should have never relaxed the guidelines they had.
LinkedIn recently lost the ability push info to my phone. It's gotten WAAAY too noisy and spammy. So much happier now with it disabled.
People are enabling alerts?!
The lack of self-awareness here is definitely funny—every major news outlet absolutely blasts their mobile apps with an endless stream of breathless breaking updates. I turned all news notifications off entirely in 2016.
> A research tool used to monitor news alerts found that the New York Times averaged 10 a day, Tagesschau in Germany averaged 1.9, NDTV in India sent 29.1, while BBC News averaged 8.3 a day.
I’m sorry but in an environment where everyone requires you to install a separate app, is it really acceptable to send 10 notifications a day? Just a single notification a day per app would end up resulting in 40-50 notifications for a user.
Dear Guardian, we have sirens in the streets for 'news too important to miss'. Any, ANY other news is very very missable. Kindly get out of your bubble. Sincerely, a paying customer.
Wow, I had no idea people allow their phones to become such a nuisance in their daily lives.
risks
I was in Texas earlier this year and there was a big hullabaloo over some lone dispatcher in some tiny flyspeck town in some rural county that sent out an alert to every single phone in the state.
Tens of millions of people were woken up to be told to be on the lookout for someone 600 miles away.
My observation is that it's too easy for police to send out an alert. And in Texas it seems that alerts go out for every little thing that involves a cop. They don't even have to be searching for someone who killed a cop. It could just be someone who took off from a traffic stop, and suddenly every phone for 500 miles goes Bleep! Bleep! Bleep!
But when a chemical plant splurts out the largest chlorine leak in a decade, and a cloud of deadly gas sweeps over a few cities, it gets announced in a closed Facebook group.â€
†This was in the Houston Chronicle earlier this week.
> Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 79% of people surveyed on the subject around the world said they did not currently receive any news alerts during an average week
Having constant news alerts sounds like a sure away to live in perpetual state of anxiety and live in whatever "manufactured consent" bubble that news outlet is pedaling. It's hard to believe people do that to themselves. But, again people engage in self-destructive behaviors, so overall it's not surprising if we think that at level.
> “If they send too many, people uninstall the app, which is obviously a disaster.
Is it a disaster? I'd call that a win for people! Maybe the answer is to trick these news app to drastically increase their notification rate, to nudge people to uninstall them? /s
Rise in "doesnt trust journalist lies" risks users disabling news.
Only a news outlet would consider disabling news notifications a risk.
Obviously they risk losing views and ad revenue, there's absolutely no "risk" to the public.
Personally I have all phone notifications off. There are a few I might like, but every single app abuses the privilege.