Only a news outlet would consider disabling news notifications a risk.
Obviously they risk losing views and ad revenue, there's absolutely no "risk" to the public.
Personally I have all phone notifications off. There are a few I might like, but every single app abuses the privilege.
UtopiaPunk · 4h ago
I know, right?
I can't imagine wanting to receive any kind of alert from a news app. If there's a real emergency, like an earthquake or tsunami warning, I believe there are alternative systems in place that will send out a special alert to phones in the area (and ideally really loud sirens outside).
I'll read or listen to the news when it makes sense in my day to do so. I very much do not want to be interrupted because a national level politician did something. If it was important, it will still be important in a few hours when I go over the news.
the_plus_one · 6h ago
We are similar. The only time my phone makes any noise whatsoever is if I get a phone call from someone in my contacts or a Slack ping during work hours. Everything else can wait.
soco · 3h ago
Not even "contacts", but the 5 favorite contacts (and even that's only vibration). Even the work app stays on silent - if I'm working I'm around anyway so I won't miss it by much, and if it's outside hours I don't even know those folks.
duxup · 6h ago
Yup, my priority contacts are the only people who get through to make my phone do things audibly.
Notifications beyond that is very limited.
getnormality · 6h ago
If I get so much as one unsolicited alert from an app, I disable notifications on it immediately. I've been doing this from the very first days I had a smartphone, in 2013 or so.
My reserves of attention are limited and extremely important for accomplishing my own goals. Nobody gets to draw from the reservoir without my consent if I can help it.
And thank goodness tech still lets me help it! I just have to pray that nobody figures out how many hundreds of billions of dollars Google or Apple need to be paid to make it impossible for me to silence notifications.
swagasaurus-rex · 6h ago
Any notification that doesn't originate from a human being or an action taken by a human being means the app's notification privileges are gone
ryandvm · 4h ago
Life is going to improve dramatically when we start seeing class action lawsuits for "theft of attention".
If attention has economic value AND if it is limited in supply, then taking it from a person without their consent is a form of theft.
benterix · 4h ago
I went a step further and set on permanent do not disturb mode with the only exceptions for the contacts defined in "close family" group and my alarm clock. Everything else is blocked by default and has to wait for the time slot I allocated to it.
bjelkeman-again · 6h ago
SMS (and equivalent direct messages,I hardly get any spam), missed calls, parking reminders and a few things from my car. The rest is blocked.
nottorp · 6h ago
> If I get so much as one unsolicited alert from an app, I disable notifications on it immediately.
But... iOS apps ask for permission to send notifications on first run. Just deny it then.
SoftTalker · 6h ago
I have disabled absolutely everthing my phone will let me disable. I allow only my own calendar/reminders, and messages from people in my contact list. Everything else is silenced or denied.
uncircle · 6h ago
I have to disable message notifications as well because people tend to express themselves in multiple messages, and we do not have the ability to beep once every minute or so instead of every message. And God help you if you are in a group chat.
Only calls are allowed on my phone, and it’s still often just robocall spam from unknown numbers. Technology is great.
alexk6 · 5h ago
"Notification cooldown" on Android 15+ does this:
> When you receive many notifications within a short time, your device will lower its volume and minimize alerts for up to 1 minute. Calls, alarms and priority conversations are not affected.
no_wizard · 6h ago
The surprisingly obvious but not implemented improvements to mobile device platforms continues to make me question whether they really know what they’re doing or not
qualeed · 6h ago
>question whether they really know what they’re doing or not
It's precisely because they know what they are doing that there are of these suspicious lack of features, dark patterns, etc.
baq · 6h ago
Nobody will get their promo from allowing to silence notifications.
ge96 · 6h ago
My phone only makes sound for alarms or if I play a video/song. It's great
eimrine · 6h ago
Isn't vibration a sound?
ge96 · 6h ago
Doesn't vibrate either, it's a setting in Android alarms only I think
duxup · 6h ago
I think my phone is silenced 80% of its life.
nottorp · 6h ago
No. Not even people in my contact list.
> And God help you if you are in a group chat.
As my sibling comment says :)
I'll check for new messages when I'm taking a break thank you.
_fat_santa · 6h ago
One thing I've noticed apps doing is they will now build native looking notification request popups. When you open the app you will see a window that looks just like the iOS notification window asking if you want to show notifications, if you click yes then you get the "official" notifications window.
They do this because if you click no on the "official" window, Apple will not let the app request notifications again, but if you click no on the app's version, they can keep asking you again and again.
IMHO Apple needs to start cracking down on these shady notification UI's
valenterry · 6h ago
No, Apple should have three options Yes, No, Never ask again. Like every other software with good UX.
nottorp · 5h ago
I think "No" means "Never ask again" in Apple land.
But that doesn't prevent the app from having custom in-app dialogs about it. What are they supposed to do, use "AI" to censor them?
yjftsjthsd-h · 5h ago
> But that doesn't prevent the app from having custom in-app dialogs about it. What are they supposed to do, use "AI" to censor them?
Can't Apple enforce it by store policy?
nottorp · 5h ago
> Can't Apple enforce it by store policy?
Not sure. For one they're already famous for their reviews being ... random.
For two, a spammer could just give Apple an account to test with for which the custom popups don't show.
duxup · 7h ago
I've never had a news app "alert" that did anything positive for me ... never.
News sites are websites I visit when I want, that's it.
LurkandComment · 6h ago
1) Everything beeps now. Phones, cars, machines etc. It gets a bit much and I just turn things off
2) On computers, so many notifications pop up and block elements of an interface. Popup that blocks what i'm reading. Popup that blocks system clock. Everything that piles up in bottom right. There are times where I have to close 2 things to get to the thing I want. I disable as many as I can.
3) Requests from websites about notification. I'm just about to read something and then all of a sudden i'm asked if I want to enable notifications.
4) Constantly asked to change default settings. This is not your default X, would you like to make it default X.
My god. I went back to non-smart watches, physical books, I unsubscribe and turn off notifications.
cvoss · 5h ago
Bad behavior risks being punished for bad behavior. Nothing to see here.
My news app is my browser. It gives me unified access to all (free) news outlets, of which there is an abundance. It also has a killer feature where it doesn't even offer to send notifications.
aaronbrethorst · 6h ago
I turned off all news notifications on November 4, 2024 and haven't regretted it once.
madcaptenor · 6h ago
On November 5 my wife had surgery, which meant that I had to hang out in a hospital waiting room. I did not want to have to see a TV, but there was nowhere in that room where that was an option.
I ended up positioning myself near the TV that was showing college football news, because I have no rooting interests in college football and that was much easier to tune out.
aaronbrethorst · 2h ago
I hope it was easy and recovery went swiftly. Election Day was my son’s second birthday and I didn’t want to be glued to my phone all day.
Daneel_ · 6h ago
I’ll bite: what was on the 4th/5th of November last year?
aaronbrethorst · 5h ago
An election for president of the United States happens every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November
MaKey · 6h ago
Why would you need news notifications anyway? If something catastrophic is going on and I need to act, I'll get an alert on my phone via cell broadcast.
reaperducer · 6h ago
I've always said, "If it's that important, I'll see the orange glow on the horizon."
But then again, sometimes I've lived in places with chemical plants, and they seem to behave in unexpected ways rather regularly.
Zak · 6h ago
I only want immediate notifications for messages from people I know, or dangerous situations in proximity to my location. I have never once wanted my phone to buzz to tell me about general breaking news.
What would be useful is to be able to set up my phone to keep low-priority notifications in a digest for later viewing with a buzz and an icon at set times of the day if there's anything in there.
BuyMyBitcoins · 6h ago
Any breaking news that is urgent enough for an alert happens to also be something a friend would text me about. Case in point, the assassination attempt in Butler PA last year.
No other “breaking news” has been relevant enough for me to reenable notifications. I check the news periodically enough as it is. That covers me wanting to know about anything interesting.
kmfrk · 6h ago
Push notifications definitely would benefit from more granular controls. Tagging alerts like discount notifications you didn't set up as something separate for instance. I don't trust some AI classification over an explicit API.
Steve Jobs once said that privacy is knowing what you sign up for. Feels like push notifications deserve the same treatment.
joe_guy · 6h ago
This is built into Android. A program like Discord has very granular controls over each type (DM, server event, stage event, etc) of notification as well as controls for each source (You can set a specific users DMs to be priority messages, silenced, show/hide from lock screen, etc).
A program like Uber Eats has a bit less benefit to allowing such controls over what they send you. While they do still break down messages by type, their descriptions are a bit cryptic and after getting an unsolicited notification from it, I ended up disabling all of them.
Zak · 6h ago
One that was annoying me for a while is Turo (like AirBnB for rental cars), which had only one notification category. When I have a rental upcoming or active, I need to be notified about messages from the host, but it would also send marketing notifications on occasion, which I never want to see. I would turn off notifications manually most of the time.
It looks like they recently split it into "marketing" and "transactional", which is probably good enough.
The one AI thing I'd like my phone to do is reliably decide when I would like to be told about any given notification using an on-device model.
teeray · 6h ago
As soon as notifications started being (inevitably) used for advertisements, they started getting disabled on my phone. The most insidious are those that you want for order status for something like food delivery, then they get leveraged into ads a few days later ("It's Taco Tuesday! Order from your favorite Mexican restaurants!").
jsbisviewtiful · 5h ago
Apps like DoorDash and Uber have notifications turned off on my device. They bypass most notification settings Apple offers and within the app you can't turn off certain notification types... so completely turned off.
r0ckarong · 6h ago
"Make the pry bar chocolate flavored" suggests chairman of the shoving down throat committee.
yodon · 5h ago
LinkedIn recently lost the ability push info to my phone. It's gotten WAAAY too noisy and spammy. So much happier now with it disabled.
callc · 6h ago
Getting distracted at random times during the day _is_ fatiguing. Try putting phone away in another room when focusing on something, focus without distraction is a super power!
jasonfrost · 6h ago
Never had a news app so
reaperducer · 6h ago
Never had a news app so
Did you die in the middle of writing your sentence?
octo888 · 4h ago
You might find it curious that it's a very Irish way of speaking. But less common in writing I believe.
If you go to Ireland, best not to accuse them of dying if they end their sentences with "so" :-)
tpl · 6h ago
Apple should have never relaxed the guidelines they had.
k__ · 6h ago
People are enabling alerts?!
turnsout · 6h ago
The lack of self-awareness here is definitely funny—every major news outlet absolutely blasts their mobile apps with an endless stream of breathless breaking updates. I turned all news notifications off entirely in 2016.
darth_avocado · 6h ago
> A research tool used to monitor news alerts found that the New York Times averaged 10 a day, Tagesschau in Germany averaged 1.9, NDTV in India sent 29.1, while BBC News averaged 8.3 a day.
I’m sorry but in an environment where everyone requires you to install a separate app, is it really acceptable to send 10 notifications a day? Just a single notification a day per app would end up resulting in 40-50 notifications for a user.
Zak · 6h ago
> everyone requires you to install a separate app
Most of these news outlet can be accessed from a single app: a web browser of your choice. I find that's a better experience anyway; it's easier to block ads and annoyances.
28304283409234 · 6h ago
Dear Guardian, we have sirens in the streets for 'news too important to miss'. Any, ANY other news is very very missable. Kindly get out of your bubble. Sincerely, a paying customer.
pengaru · 6h ago
Wow, I had no idea people allow their phones to become such a nuisance in their daily lives.
awinter-py · 6h ago
risks
reaperducer · 6h ago
I was in Texas earlier this year and there was a big hullabaloo over some lone dispatcher in some tiny flyspeck town in some rural county that sent out an alert to every single phone in the state.
Tens of millions of people were woken up to be told to be on the lookout for someone 600 miles away.
My observation is that it's too easy for police to send out an alert. And in Texas it seems that alerts go out for every little thing that involves a cop. They don't even have to be searching for someone who killed a cop. It could just be someone who took off from a traffic stop, and suddenly every phone for 500 miles goes Bleep! Bleep! Bleep!
But when a chemical plant splurts out the largest chlorine leak in a decade, and a cloud of deadly gas sweeps over a few cities, it gets announced in a closed Facebook group.†
†This was in the Houston Chronicle earlier this week.
rdtsc · 6h ago
> Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 79% of people surveyed on the subject around the world said they did not currently receive any news alerts during an average week
Having constant news alerts sounds like a sure away to live in perpetual state of anxiety and live in whatever "manufactured consent" bubble that news outlet is pedaling. It's hard to believe people do that to themselves. But, again people engage in self-destructive behaviors, so overall it's not surprising if we think that at level.
> “If they send too many, people uninstall the app, which is obviously a disaster.
Is it a disaster? I'd call that a win for people! Maybe the answer is to trick these news app to drastically increase their notification rate, to nudge people to uninstall them? /s
incomingpain · 7h ago
Rise in "doesnt trust journalist lies" risks users disabling news.
Obviously they risk losing views and ad revenue, there's absolutely no "risk" to the public.
Personally I have all phone notifications off. There are a few I might like, but every single app abuses the privilege.
I'll read or listen to the news when it makes sense in my day to do so. I very much do not want to be interrupted because a national level politician did something. If it was important, it will still be important in a few hours when I go over the news.
Notifications beyond that is very limited.
My reserves of attention are limited and extremely important for accomplishing my own goals. Nobody gets to draw from the reservoir without my consent if I can help it.
And thank goodness tech still lets me help it! I just have to pray that nobody figures out how many hundreds of billions of dollars Google or Apple need to be paid to make it impossible for me to silence notifications.
If attention has economic value AND if it is limited in supply, then taking it from a person without their consent is a form of theft.
But... iOS apps ask for permission to send notifications on first run. Just deny it then.
Only calls are allowed on my phone, and it’s still often just robocall spam from unknown numbers. Technology is great.
> When you receive many notifications within a short time, your device will lower its volume and minimize alerts for up to 1 minute. Calls, alarms and priority conversations are not affected.
It's precisely because they know what they are doing that there are of these suspicious lack of features, dark patterns, etc.
> And God help you if you are in a group chat.
As my sibling comment says :)
I'll check for new messages when I'm taking a break thank you.
They do this because if you click no on the "official" window, Apple will not let the app request notifications again, but if you click no on the app's version, they can keep asking you again and again.
IMHO Apple needs to start cracking down on these shady notification UI's
But that doesn't prevent the app from having custom in-app dialogs about it. What are they supposed to do, use "AI" to censor them?
Can't Apple enforce it by store policy?
Not sure. For one they're already famous for their reviews being ... random.
For two, a spammer could just give Apple an account to test with for which the custom popups don't show.
News sites are websites I visit when I want, that's it.
2) On computers, so many notifications pop up and block elements of an interface. Popup that blocks what i'm reading. Popup that blocks system clock. Everything that piles up in bottom right. There are times where I have to close 2 things to get to the thing I want. I disable as many as I can.
3) Requests from websites about notification. I'm just about to read something and then all of a sudden i'm asked if I want to enable notifications.
4) Constantly asked to change default settings. This is not your default X, would you like to make it default X.
My god. I went back to non-smart watches, physical books, I unsubscribe and turn off notifications.
My news app is my browser. It gives me unified access to all (free) news outlets, of which there is an abundance. It also has a killer feature where it doesn't even offer to send notifications.
I ended up positioning myself near the TV that was showing college football news, because I have no rooting interests in college football and that was much easier to tune out.
But then again, sometimes I've lived in places with chemical plants, and they seem to behave in unexpected ways rather regularly.
What would be useful is to be able to set up my phone to keep low-priority notifications in a digest for later viewing with a buzz and an icon at set times of the day if there's anything in there.
No other “breaking news” has been relevant enough for me to reenable notifications. I check the news periodically enough as it is. That covers me wanting to know about anything interesting.
Steve Jobs once said that privacy is knowing what you sign up for. Feels like push notifications deserve the same treatment.
A program like Uber Eats has a bit less benefit to allowing such controls over what they send you. While they do still break down messages by type, their descriptions are a bit cryptic and after getting an unsolicited notification from it, I ended up disabling all of them.
It looks like they recently split it into "marketing" and "transactional", which is probably good enough.
The one AI thing I'd like my phone to do is reliably decide when I would like to be told about any given notification using an on-device model.
Did you die in the middle of writing your sentence?
If you go to Ireland, best not to accuse them of dying if they end their sentences with "so" :-)
I’m sorry but in an environment where everyone requires you to install a separate app, is it really acceptable to send 10 notifications a day? Just a single notification a day per app would end up resulting in 40-50 notifications for a user.
Most of these news outlet can be accessed from a single app: a web browser of your choice. I find that's a better experience anyway; it's easier to block ads and annoyances.
Tens of millions of people were woken up to be told to be on the lookout for someone 600 miles away.
My observation is that it's too easy for police to send out an alert. And in Texas it seems that alerts go out for every little thing that involves a cop. They don't even have to be searching for someone who killed a cop. It could just be someone who took off from a traffic stop, and suddenly every phone for 500 miles goes Bleep! Bleep! Bleep!
But when a chemical plant splurts out the largest chlorine leak in a decade, and a cloud of deadly gas sweeps over a few cities, it gets announced in a closed Facebook group.†
†This was in the Houston Chronicle earlier this week.
Having constant news alerts sounds like a sure away to live in perpetual state of anxiety and live in whatever "manufactured consent" bubble that news outlet is pedaling. It's hard to believe people do that to themselves. But, again people engage in self-destructive behaviors, so overall it's not surprising if we think that at level.
> “If they send too many, people uninstall the app, which is obviously a disaster.
Is it a disaster? I'd call that a win for people! Maybe the answer is to trick these news app to drastically increase their notification rate, to nudge people to uninstall them? /s