It starts innocently enough. You download an app and it asks for your permission to send you push notifications. Of course you think. What harm can come of this? I would like to know when my package arrives or my burrito is ready. But then you download more apps and they all need your permission to send you notifications, and before you know it, your lock screen is full of apps clamoring for your attention.
Apps never close. They are hungry for engagement. They want you to know that your favorite items are on sale, that you didn’t practice your Spanish today, that your delivery driver is five stops away, that your kindergartner just threw a tantrum—all day, all at once. Welcome to a place where we all live, a place called Notification Hell.
We haven’t always lived here. For a while now, companies like Apple wouldn’t let app developers roam without wanting to forcefully demand our attention at any time of the day. They insisted that power should be used for good, not evil. That didn’t last long. App developers are now allowed to send us marketing communications as long as we’ve opted in. And guess what: if you chose to have any notifications at all, you chose a lot of them. The call even comes from inside the house now – Apple advertises its services in settings menus and Samsung tries to sell you a new phone… while you’re using your Samsung phone. There’s really nowhere to hide.
The road to notification hell is paved with well-intentioned digital assistants
The problem isn’t just the ads. The digital assistants on our phones try hard to learn our behavior and predict our every move. Probably because they’re robots, they don’t really understand what’s useful and what’s not. For example, when Siri sees that I have a flight on my calendar, so it offers a shortcut to put my phone on airplane mode. Right after that, he asks me if I want to join the appointment on my calendar: my flight. The road to notification hell is paved with well-intentioned digital assistants.
It’s not an assistant, but Google Photos often commits notification crimes. It’s always learning new tricks, like how to recognize a beer or a latte in a photo, and then pesters you to look at how it can identify all the beer and latte photos you’ve taken. He also really wants me to know when he finds a bunch of similar photos of my cat sleeping on various pieces of furniture, attracting their uninvited attention like a dog finding a stick. My brother in Christ, I took the pictures. I know they look alike.
The developers of our operating systems are not entirely indifferent to our suffering; they threw us some lifelines. On iOS, you can have time-insensitive notifications collected in a daily digest and delivered once a day. You can also set focus modes – the UI is its own kind of hell – or make certain apps deliver notifications silently unless they’re time-sensitive. But if you do, you have to solve a puzzle first.
Answer me these three questions… Not the most user friendly interface.
I tried this once with Amazon. I thought I had it configured to only get notifications when a package arrived. Apparently I did this wrong because a grocery order was sitting outside my house for five hours on the night of the Fourth of July. Now I let Amazon send me as many notifications as it wants.
This sums up our situation: we are trapped in notification hell and there will be no escape. We have a few meager tools in our hands, but the onus is on us to find a way out. Until I figure out my notification settings, I know I’m in for the long haul. For now, it’s just a comfort to know there are others with me, because misery loves company.
Add Comment