Ted SpenceLet’s talk about a problem - software cannot be trusted anymore. In the past, if I allowed an app to send me notifications, I’d get alerted for things I wanted to hear about. Now every app uses spurious notifications as a way to artificially boost their daily active user count. I am one by one having to shut off notifications on apps that used to be reliable products. I’ve disabled notifications on linkedin because it keeps sending me ads and random unnecessary alerts.
Even worse, companies are subject to neverending pressure to drive up usage and revenue. First they sell ads. When ad blockers become common, they move to subscriptions. When subscription revenue isn't enough, they bring back ads for subscribers - but now the subscribers can't avoid them. This is why I canceled @TheAtlantic - my paid membership now includes unskippable advertising.
Marcus Müller@Tedspence @TheAtlantic revenue – I can see that, from a commercial perspective; actually, you'd aim at profit, not revenue, and yes, having ads costs you (if just through disgruntling customers, but also in administration, development and IT ops).
But there's no reason that *usage* is but a very weak proxy. Yet, I've uninstalled apps just because they kept adding new notification categories each update.
Who will happily follow a *new* notification after suppressing the last five categories?
@funkylab @TheAtlantic A real opportunity for #Apple would be to allow users to report inappropriate or unwanted notifications in apps. That would rapidly highlight the problem that some apps have major issues with spamming users!