
Notifications are highly reliable, except when device manufacturers interfere - gdeglin
https://onesignal.com/blog/manufacturers-interfere-with-reliable-notifications/
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jjoonathan
Manufacturers, please keep interfering with notifications.

Better yet, let's get google in on the business and do it by default in a
standardized fashion on every android device. Spam is bad enough sitting idly
in my message center. I don't want my phone to fill up with battery-guzzling
nagware unless I very explicitly enable it. An acceptable compromise would be
to enable notifications by default but put a permanent disable option on each
and every message so that users could punish apps on the first abuse.

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PhasmaFelis
> _I don 't want my phone to fill up with battery-guzzling nagware_

...Then don't? You control what you install.

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amluto
You should be able to install an app at without allowing it to do anything in
the background whatsoever.

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npunt
So it seems like most Android manufacturers are independently adding their own
aggressive power savings mode which kills apps - and prevents any background
tasks or notifications - just about as soon as they're out of the foreground.
And users have no idea this is the case when they buy the phone.

Seems like Google should just create a better power management system - or one
that selectively lets through notifications without firing up the whole app -
rather than have the manufacturers bungle this up.

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tomc1985
If phone apps followed a proper runtime lifecycle -- start, use, terminate --
and phones had proper task management this would be visible front-and-center
and wouldn't be an issue.

And I don't share this author's view on notifications... most of the messaging
delivered to me via notifications is neither urgent nor time-sensitive.
Notifications are a nuisance

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khedoros1
I disable most notifications. Basically everything besides sms and e-mail (and
only for some accounts that tend to get 2-3 messages a day). The ones that
remain activated tend to be reasonably urgent, and the apps that receive them
are the ones that I'd like to start as soon as the phone boots and keep
permanently in memory. Or at least, I'd like my remaining notifications to be
able to wake up the apps they belong to.

~~~
tomc1985
Me too, yet theres always more to block. Especially on Android.

And if you do block notifications? Some apps needle you about it relentlessly!

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dmritard96
Background beacon services or location services also suffer from this although
I'm not always sure whether it is the OS author or the manufacturer.

The trick here is that these manufacturers know that people will try a
different phone if they believe that one brand or another's battery won't last
very long. (Ironically they probably all buy batteries from Samsung)

It drives me mad since our company provides software and hardware that does
beacon and geofencing related tasks but the flip side is that I also know that
when my Samsung battery is half that of my Wife's phone even though its 2
years newer, I'm definitely starting to think to myself 'maybe I should switch
to an iPhone'. I think the real issue here is probably people wanting to do
more than batteries really permit at the moment and its a frustrating tug of
war.

The obvious answer in my mind is to give users the power to choose what they
want. Its fine for manufacturers to choose defaults that will work for non
power users.

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ams6110
Funny. The first thing I do (if it's an option) is disable notifications. I
don't like my phone constantly interrupting me. I check for messages and email
at my convenience, not the phone's.

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BEEdwards
And i have my notification going to my watch so I always know what's going on.

People have different uses for their technology.

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towb
I just got a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 a while back, a lot of phone for not a lot of
money. Anyway, it comes with MIUI, a stupid version of Android, and
notifications was very rare with the default settings. You have to enable
notifications per app, and then there was some sort of aggressive killing of
background apps, so you wouldn't get any notification from many apps anyway
since they weren't alive to send them.

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johnbrodie
All of these battery saving options are great, when they are painless. Running
apps that _need_ to stay in the background like Tasker is a much more painful
experience now than it was a few years ago.

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jorams
> It's now only a matter of time before app-to-user SMS goes away entirely.

Was this ever a thing? The only SMS messages from "apps" I ever get are for
2FA codes.

Maybe it's regional? I know sending SMS to US numbers is a lot cheaper than,
for example, Dutch numbers.

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gdeglin
The high cost of SMS in some countries is a big factor, but there are other
reasons that many publishers have largely moved off of SMS to push whenever
possible:

1\. SMS Aggregator+Carrier integrations can be buggy, especially when
optimizing for low cost aggregators.

2\. Carriers often have filters in place that can block content without the
publisher being notified. Unsurprisingly, SMSs that contain URLs frequently
get blocked by these filters.

3\. Carriers have inconsistent standards when it comes to content, encoding,
and even length of SMS messages.

4\. It's easy for publishers to track the deliverability and CTR of
notifications.

