Summarizer

Worse even because iOS doesn't offer notification groups/channels like Android does (ignoring the fact that market leaders like Uber, DoorDash, etc. eschew them in favor of "General" channels they can pump both delivery/ride info and ads through.) IMO this needs to be an app guideline enforced by the iOS App Store and Play Store. I remember back in the day, iOS used to be known for having less spammy notifications.

Notification "channels" -- what a wild west Some apps use just one channel and use it to send both really important stuff (like fraud alerts on your credit card) as well as ads so you cannot turn them off even if you wanted to. Other apps create 4 new channels a week so you cannot turn them off even if you wanted to.

I use an app called BuzzKill on Android for achieving this and many more things. I usually keep my notification bar at an absolute minimum when it comes to the number of notifications, but this app allows me to set rules for notifications based on their content. By default, all apps that I use have notifications turned off by default and they also get into deep sleep mode. So I'm sure they are not even running after a while. Only apps like WhatsApp, Slack, Signal can receive notifications. And by using the rules on Buzzkill, I am also able to automatically discard marketing notifications and useless notifications from these apps as well. For an app like Google Maps though, I completely turned off notifications because there's really no need for me to have them. If you go into the notification settings through the Google Maps app, it's a big shitshow because it has some 40 categories that you will have to manually manage and I'm sure this was designed for the very purpose of letting users become tired after looking at them and then leave things as is. Similarly, I do think the vast majority of the apps that we use don't need to send us any notifications at all. Thanks to Android for adding this feature to block all notifications from apps some four years ago, I guess.

My approach to this problem is to not install apps that could be websites, and to remove apps that send me useless notifications. Some apps use notification categories, which gives the user some control. A feature that would make this app useful to me is a notification digest as a third option in addition to allow and deny. The digest would hold certain notifications and show them to me all at once on a schedule I set. For a concrete use case, I have low-priority group chats and high-priority direct messages in the same messaging app. I want the direct messages to interrupt me at any time, and I want to be told I have unread group chats a couple times a day without having to poll them manually.

This is great! Looking forward to using it. Especially the rule-based filtering function, as my biggest sore spot with notifications are the few handful of highly functional apps that stuff marketing notifications into notification groups that are not marked for marketing.

Imho there are 3 separate classes of notifications 1) Ads - these should not exist, really, or at worst should be flagged in the app store as an anti-feature isolateable from other notifications. 2) "Recommendations" - that is, stuff you didn't subscribe to but are things the app offers that they "think you would like". These are defensible but should never ever be mixed with... 3) Stuff I actually explicitly subscribed to. Breaking these rules should be rejection from the app store. Especially now that Google is legally required to allow 3rd-party app stores, they have much greater grounds to properly curate the Play Store. Let the filth live on 3rd-party stores.

This is really great. I chuckled seeing MyGate. I hate that app. My society uses it and I'd need this exactly for it. I hate that Android doesn't force devs to use the right notification category. Apps need to be penalized for not adhering to that.