Tangential Counterpoint: I have no connection to this thing and also question its value, but…
At least on iOS, I think calendar reminders (both native and gcal) are fundamentally broken. Their notifications easily get lost in a sea of other notifications and are easily missed.
I would argue that it’s the “sea of other notifications” that’s the problem, and that can be easily fixed by going through the notifications settings and disabling them for anything less important than calendar reminders. Do you really need to be interrupted every time someone likes an Instagram post?
There are dark patterns in the way. I need to know when my Doordash arrives. But I can't opt in only to useful notifications and opt out of marketing offers. If I turn them on and off only when I need them, I'm gunnuh slip up. So currently I'm accepting a noisier feed. I'd like to do something about it programmatically but it's hasn't worked it's way high enough on my to-do list to actually get done.
Such a ux nightmare. It’s inexcusable that apple or google doesn’t extend their design guidelines to classify different types of notifications beyond “critical” and “non critical”.
I’m sure this is intentional. But if apple could get the “ask app not to track” button off the ground surely they could make some headway in differentiating “your package has arrived” from “this just in! 15% off stupid bullshit” and being able to opt out from the latter?
God what a stupid future we’ve created. “Oh we have to make the critical notification feed functionally useless because of pressure from marketing partners”
Don't bundle Google into this, Android does have arbitrary notification channels. You absolutely can make certain types of notifications silent or turned off completely while keeping other types of notifications turned on. It's been a thing for 5+ years now.
For example Glovo delivery app has an "order updates" category, which I keep turned on, and I turn off the rest of them.
But do you have to do within the app or on a per app basis? Not as familiar with android. That’s a step in the right direction but I mean something more like delineating them at the os level so I can go into settings and say “I don’t want to see marketing related notifications from any application ever”. If an app mislabels marketing notifications to circumvent this it gets pulled from the store or (ideally) doesn’t pass review. So I can just flick off a toggle for those intrusive notifications but keep my important ones. Then my feed is suddenly worthwhile again with stuff like package delivery, calendar, messaging apps, etc. fussing around inside each app is a pain in the butt (although better than not being able to do so at all).
But does this apply for all apps on android or is it up to the dev? Can you make the Amazon shopping app just give notifications about package delivery and make it shut the fuck up about sales and suggested items? Or doordash, instacart, etc? If the dev can just ignore it then it’s kind of pointless and why I mean it should be part of the design guidelines
Maybe if the ftc would get off it’s ass and force the issue. The USA is legally required to have unsubscribe links in commercial emails, I don’t see how this is all that different
Right and when you accidentally say no to the ones that actually matter?
The whole problem with a sea of notifications is that it’s hard to identify what’s important and what’s not. Your suggested solution does nothing to solve that problem other than to relocate when the problem arises.
Counterpoint: I found out the other day that friends and family were messaging me on Instagram, and I had no idea Instagram even had direct messaging support.
For several years people were messaging me and I was completely oblivious.
Yeah, but (I think?) be default they make the same notification sound as everything else and don’t vibrate. I need something else to distinguish them other than appearing differently on the Lock Screen. My phone is usually in my pocket.
It would also be nice if you could snooze them.
At this point if I really want to be alerted (leave now or you miss the train, etc) I set an alarm. But you can’t really do that any sooner than the day you want to be alerted because alarms don’t have dates (technically you can sort of do it with alarms on specific days of the week).
I have found the only way I can reliably get any notifications on iOS is to set them as “persistent” (ie-they remain on the screen until manually dismissed). Otherwise, they vanish into a pull-down screen that I have never become accustomed to routinely checking and is trivially easy to ignore as there are no status bar nags like on Android.
as a recent iOS user with years of android muscle memory. it infuriates me that scrolling from the top opens the useless siri suggestions instead of the notifications screen. I can’t take it.
The Outlook ones always get my attention, I think they make the phone vibrate, and they show up on my Apple Watch. But sometimes I do miss some pings, mainly if people join the call too early.
At least on iOS, I think calendar reminders (both native and gcal) are fundamentally broken. Their notifications easily get lost in a sea of other notifications and are easily missed.