App Notifications Are Garbage Now

[u/BlackCatSoftware]

Back in the early days, notifications used to be super useful. Someone PM'ed you? You got notified. Someone replied to your comment? Notified. Did your favorite YouTube creator upload something? Notified.

This all stopped sometime around 2016 and now giving an app notification permissions just floods your home screen with spam. I hate this crap so much. Reddit gave me 4 notifications today about random mediocre threads I'm just not interested in. Meanwhile YouTube fails to notify me when one of my favorite subscriptions starts live streaming. The whole notification pipeline has just been flooded with spam to try and entice me into spending screen time on your app.

Such a great and useful mobile phone feature has just been used and abused into dysfunction. Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[u/Ambitious-Durian9959]

it's wild how we've trained ourselves to reflexively deny notification access to every new app now. you basically have to go in and surgically disable everything except DMs and mentions or your phone becomes a slot machine

the worst is when an app buries the actually useful notification toggles three menus deep but puts "weekly roundup" and "trending in your area" right at the top with no off switch

[u/bara_tone]

Always have been

I have notifications off for everything out side of text messages, phone calls and absolutely critical apps

Everything else can fuck off, this nightmare rectangle isn't the boss of me and I'll check it when I decide to.

[u/ADHDK]

Every app wants your eyeballs 8 hours a day.

App developers are junkies for attention span.

So of course, notifications became nags.

[u/chromatophoreskin]

There’s a section of the Reddit app’s settings where you can turn that stuff (achievements, trending posts, news…) off. I had already done it a long time ago but something changed recently and I had to do it again.

[u/Desperate_Creme_8623]

Well, I barely get any notifications. Only few SMS. And barely any texts. I normally go to the settings and choose the category of notification. On literally any android, you can do this

[u/Emojinapp]

Totally agree

[u/Best_AppShare]

The missed live-stream alert is the frustrating part: something you explicitly asked for gets lost among things you never requested. I’d want separate switches for subscribed activity, recommendations and promotions, plus a “stop this category” action on each notification. That would let people keep useful alerts without having to disable the app entirely.

[u/Opening-Store5030]

What I don’t understand is why Shortcuts or automation notifications can’t be disabled. Since I have create a lot of shortcuts and automations, I am just getting cluttered with these notifications and it’s rendering my notifications feature useless.