
Rampant Abuse of Push Notifications Is Ruining Them For All Developers - dirtae
http://blog.anylistapp.com/2012/11/push-notifications/
======
nostromo
I wish spam prevention was a bigger part of Apple's culture.

I get spam robocalls on my iPhone and have no way to block them. I have
recently started getting unblockable requests to Facetime with strangers on my
Mac -- a service I didn't even know I was logged into. I have an Apple email
address that is way behind Gmail on spam prevention. And as noted in the
article, iOS notification spam is now an issue.

In contrast, Google has anti-spam as a core corporate competency. They know
that where there is a profit motive, there will be spam. They truly think like
hackers -- "if I were a bad actor, how would I abuse this feature?" Apple
needs to pick this up.

~~~
dredmorbius
For Android at least, there are numerous call-blocking apps. I use (though am
increasingly frustrated with the privacy policy and feature-creep of) Mr
Number, which can block all unknown numbers as well as specific blacklisted
numbers.

What I'd _REALLY_ prefer would be a way to categorize contacts into priority
groups. Family/VIP, who can reach me 24/7/365. Friends who can call most of
the time. Other contacts who can reach me daylight/weekday hours. And the rest
who roll straight to voicemail. Add a schedulable exception (allow all calls
in the next X hours because I'm expecting one from someone whose number I
can't identify in advance).

Combine this with a visual voicemail (Google's product is good, but they
already own far, far, far too much of my life) and I'd bitch a lot less about
phones.

Increasingly: voice calls are very distracting and annoying. Unless you've got
very good reason to call me, don't. I don't even get to "please don't call me"
any more, I'll simply hang up (on the rare occasions an unwelcome call gets
through).

~~~
nathan_long
Agreed. There's a lot more to improve about phones' actual telephony.

>> Family/VIP, who can reach me 24/7/365.

Also: a message like "Hi family, I'm asleep/busy, but if you really need me,
press 1 to ring me anyway" would be wonderful. They wouldn't worry about
calling at a bad time, and you wouldn't get awakened for something trivial.

In general, "what would a good human assistant do?" is a good question for
computer systems. A secretary wouldn't wake you unless it was important.

~~~
comex
iOS 6's Do Not Disturb feature has an option that lets the caller through if
they call twice, which can achieve a similar effect, though not only for a
specific group.

~~~
dredmorbius
Still wouldn't have helped for the recruiter who redialed me 6 times while I
was attempting to read a 400-page PDF manual (incoming calls dump you out of
the Adobe PDF reader and you've got to re-find your place in the document),
while attempting to recover a melted down server in the colo (hadn't
anticipated this, laptop was at the office).

Solution: tell the recruiting firm never, ever, ever to contact me again.

Second solution: take off and nuke Adobe from orbit.

Third solution: ePub for docs, people. It's multi-form-factor fungible, and
the readers are vastly, vastly more functional than anything built for PDF.

~~~
comex
Fourth solution: use iBooks, it doesn't lose your page. :p

~~~
dredmorbius
Android?

~~~
comex
Oh... I assumed you were using iOS because you replied to my comment about iOS
6.

------
mamoswined
The most hilarious one on my phone is a local transit app, which is sadly very
useful so I'm keeping it, with an irate developer who uses push notifications
to angrily respond to negative reviews in the App store. I get notifications
like "Response to Gregory's negative review."

I actually read them sometimes because they are mildly amusing things like
"Gregory's Review: 1/5 stars, didn't work. Developer comments: HOW ABOUT
FILING A REAL BUG REPORT SO I CAN HELP YOU INSTEAD OF LEAVING A VAGUE BAD
REVIEW."

~~~
MichaelApproved
That's tragically funny but it shows another problem with the app store. Years
after the app store has been released, Apple hasn't solved a basic need for
support and bug tracking. It would be an big help the community (both customer
and developer) to give them a transparent and easy way to communicate issues
with each other.

Does anyone know if this has been addressed in anyway with Apple saying they
are considering it or not?

~~~
rhizome
How about app developers add a menu/settings item entitled something like
"Find a bug?" that links to or facilitates the developer's own bug tracker?

~~~
suresk
Basically, no matter what the developer and Apple do, people will always use
reviews as a place to submit vague bugs.

There have been a few times where I was lucky enough to be able to track
someone down based on their username and personally contact them to help them
out, but if they'd gone though official channels for support instead of via a
review, it would have been much better for both of us.

I actually would like to see the ability for developers to publicly respond to
reviews. Sure, some may abuse it by submitting nasty responses to bad reviews,
but good developers would provide useful/polite responses, and that would be
another signal users could use to determine if they want to buy the app in the
first place.

~~~
toyg
> Basically, no matter what the developer and Apple do, people will always use
> reviews as a place to submit vague bugs.

Easy fix then: a small checkbox on review page "this is a technical problem",
which will forward review and contact details for the reviewer to an arbitrary
developer bugsystem.

------
slapshot
That's a nice commons you've got there. It'd be a tragedy if something
happened to it.

As has been extensively discussed, there are lots of drawbacks to the App
Store model. But if they actually enforced limits on push notifications (or
maybe even charged developers for them), it'll slow the tragedy of the commons
a bit. I agree that individual users could do the same, but the marginal
spammy app still has every incentive to be spammy.

~~~
Lewisham
Charging developers is probably going to result in the opposite of what you
want: notifying the user of something useful probably monetizes far less than
the spammy notifications instead.

Apple just needs to get a grip and start swinging banhammers, like Facebook
did with Zynga. Put troublesome apps in a probation period, where notification
strings end up going through an approval process. And punish developers by
holding subsequent apps up in the review process.

~~~
jmonegro
A.K.A. The Cobra Effect <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect>

------
btilly
The right solution is to have every single push notification have a "Silence
this" link on it. That takes you to a screen naming the app and asking if you
want to turn off its ability to do push notifications. This fact is tracked
across users.

Add a warning from Apple that any app that is turned off by too many people
will be deemed to be too spammy, and taken out of the app store.

This would completely solve the problem. In the absence of any such mechanism,
all incentives point towards continued abuse of the feature.

~~~
chrisdevereux
Had the same thought. It's an annoying additional piece of information on each
notification, but considerably less annoying than them being abused.

Also the risk of false positives. It'd be possible for an app to have a high
rate of disabling push notifications, but not be genuinely spammy.

Edit: _not_ be genuinely spammy

------
rm999
I remember the day Draw Something started abusing push notifications: the
_paid_ version was sending me ads for other zynga games. What sucks is push
notifications are almost essential for the functionality of the game: without
them, you have to constantly check if it's your turn. I and many other people
deleted the app as soon as the ads showed up. Talk about destroying a very
valuable network effect for a quick profit-grab.

I'm now part of that group who reflexively rejects notification requests. I
agree with this article that Apple should take action, but app makers should
also realize the cost of abusing their customers.

~~~
danielweber
And this is why users don't want to upgrade: the upgrade may be less valuable
but out to monetize you.

So we developers can't get rid of our broken stuff because people are afraid
to upgrade.

------
raldi
I recently had to disable notifications for Words With Friends (it took two
tries). The "nudges" were bad enough (I'll make my move when I have some free
time, damn it) but the final straw was when they started holiday spam -- e.g.,
"Why not celebrate Halloween by playing a word like SPOOKY, WITCH, or
DRACULA?"

No, fuck you, Zynga. And Dracula shouldn't even be a playable word.

------
S_A_P
The same goes for Notification bubbles!!!!!!

I have deleted some games from my system because they display notification
bubbles above the icon or app folder. That drives me insane. A few examples I
can call out are Halfbrick studios. Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja both do
this too often for my taste and have been removed from my phone because of it.
These are particularly bad examples because of how many taps it takes to
actually show and clear the notification. I wish there was an opt out with
these things as it disturbs my OCD to have a clean desktop and no notification
bubbles.

~~~
ghewgill
But... you can disable those. They are called "Badges". Turn off the "Badge
App Icon" option in the notification settings for the app in question.

~~~
3JPLW
Not all Badges are moderated through the notification center. Doodle Jump is
one such app that manages to sneak badges past it -- they're not push
notifications, but are populated upon application close.

------
lazyjones
First reaction to this: "Wow, that must be annoying, I'm glad I don't have
these apps. What were the developers thinking, how do they get away with these
shady practices?"

Second reaction: "Perhaps they are doing something right and we should be
doing that in our apps. Perhaps younger people actually like such things,
after all they get dozens of sms every day and it makes them feel
important/liked?"

------
jeffclark
"As a result, users are starting to reflexively reject app requests to send
push notifications."

Source? An actual, non-vague stat? Proof?

------
boctor
OK, so there is gratuitous use of push notifications, but it's also unfair to
compare push usage between a utility app and apps that are trying to convince
you to try something new.

How about we compare the pushes to email campaigns by companies?

I for one am constantly amazed at how much users tolerate these emails.

So I say, yes, make it easier to stop the pushes just like it's easy to
unsubscribe from email campaigns. It could be as easy as making sure users
know that the pushes stop when the app is uninstalled.

But I think outside of other app developers and the tech community, users may
not feel as strongly that this is abuse.

------
kylelibra
At the very least they should ban apps that have a way where no matter how
many times you check it, the icon always has the little (1) on it. GetGlue was
doing this for a while, but it appears they stopped.

~~~
jobu
That always irked me too. Now you can disable those little app notification
badges in settings.

------
gourneau
TaskRabbit was abusing them as well. We should do our best to shame any
organization that sends spam via push notifications.

------
SquareWheel
The same is true of in-app purchases. How many scammy "buy 3000 mojo points!"
apps are out there now? At this point I don't even bother with an app if I see
in-app purchases. Shame for those who use them correctly, like Alien Blue.

~~~
duskwuff
Perhaps it'd be useful if Apple would make a distinction between applications
with one-time IAPs (e.g, "upgrade to SurfWriter Plus for $1.99") and
applications with consumable IAPs (e.g, "get ten thousand zorkberries for
$1.99"). The latter are almost certainly the sort of IAPs that are
fundamentally bothering you here.

------
bstar77
The one that's been killing me lately are the notifications from the new He-
Man game for iPhone. I have yet to figure out how to turn off push
notifications for this app, it's not in the in-game settings or in the
Settings app and I know I never enabled them in any dialogs. I just randomly
get random messages about how I'm not doing a good enough job saving Eternia.
If I can't figure this out soon the game is gone.

Isn't this the kind of abuse that the app store approval process should be
addressing? If notifications are supported, then they should be required to be
configurable in the Settings app, no exceptions.

~~~
jefflinwood
They might be local notifications from the app itself, not remote push
notifications.

~~~
idunno246
And there is no way to turn these off. The app just has to schedule them while
its running.

~~~
comex
If you care enough, I suggest filing a radar.

------
flurp
I've been calling Facebook Notifications the Push Notification of the Web,
they are great, maybe just as good as native Push Notifications. But they have
also "solved" (it's new and yet to see) the spam problem recently by
implementing harsh restrictions on how you as a developer can send them. It
would be interesting if Apple and Google copied this behavior. Basically Apps
that send > 50000 notifications a week have to maintain a 17% Click-To-
Impression ratio. However I find the 50K an oddly picked number which should
instead be based on installed user base.

------
mikeash
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is intentional. A big problem
with computer security is that people just blindly click "OK" to any sort of
authorization prompt. Ever since push notification abuse started to get bad,
I've been much more careful about reading the authorization prompts that my
phone throws up, after authorizing some apps for push notifications without
thinking through the implications, then having to manually turn them off
later.

------
dsl
The Instacart notifications are just insane. I got into the early beta and
never used the app a single time because of the sheer volume of annoying
pushes I'd get.

------
rossjudson
Apple needs to start engaging in Pagerank-style ranking of applications in the
store, and including metrics like "number of push notifications sent, per
user" in the calculation. Please also include "number of applications per
developer".

And please revise the guidelines such that if in-app purchases are turned off
on the phone, showing the user a catalog or purchases screen is grounds for
rejection.

------
zobzu
Those notifications are the "fucking horror". I uninstall any app (on Android,
mind you) that does that.

heck, i even dislike the notifications when the app is on the foreground
(specially the apps begging for rating on the market: when i get one, i just
go put one star). but the background ones are TRUE EVIL. :P

~~~
MikeKusold
I have no issues with an app asking me ONCE (unless I press `later`) for a
ranking. The fact of the matter is that once I install an app, I'm going to
forget about the fact that it came from the Play Store and I'm just going to
use it. If it weren't for those pop-ups, I would only ever write reviews when
an app pissed me off.

------
phil
Just tap Don't Allow.

Edit: More seriously, all four of those suggestions are very good, and I'd
like to see them too. For #4, a deep link to the app's notification settings
would be good enough, and probably more likely than getting a notification
settings controller in UIKit.

~~~
estel
Isn't that the point of the OP?

Apps that are increasingly abusing push notifications means that users are
increasingly just choosing "Don't Allow" even when push notifications are a
key part of a non-spammy app, because they're wary of later being spammed.

------
rsl7
I hate all notifications except my morning alarm clock. I don't want to be
interrupted.

------
priyanka_sri
I am not for "Provide a feedback mechanism that allows users to report spammy
notifications, and crack down on abusive apps." because 'what is' spam is
highly subjective, and this can be used against the App to bring down even
genuine Apps! I wouldn't agree that we can let the iPhone user remain ignorant
of what is all this about Push Notifications! If the user bought the iPhone,
if the user 'chose to' install the App, then it falls upon the user to learn
how to use it! Is it not? When we buy, say, a new electronic equipment, say a
new refrigerator, is it not upon us to learn about how to use it controls?

------
zaidf
Same is also true for facebook notifications. I recently got a notification
that said "Blabla has given you a free movie on Flixster." Now, I am actually
down to try a service that gives me a free movie rental. But because of my
past experience with fb notifications, I immediately hit 'Ignore' thinking it
was another gimmicky spam.

Facebook has focused so much at Games that I think it will begin to hurt them
when more well-known businesses in other categories try to use their platform
to distribute offers.

------
frankus
As mentioned before, Local Notifications can be equally spammy, are impossible
to turn off, and are visually indistinguishable from push notifications.

The are also not subject to a strict interpretation of the app review
guidelines.

The only limitation is that they need to be set ahead of time when the app is
active, or triggered by one of the background modes (geofencing, significant
location change, task completion, Bluetooth LE, etc.)

------
jdavid
I think this could be solved with a simple like/dislike button for
notifications.

If that type of notification is unwanted you could, dislike it and it would
suppress notifications of that type for ... x days. If you do it enough, it
would disable it. If enough of the apps notifications are disliked then the
apps notification privileges get suspended all together.

------
kmfrk
I can't for the life of me figure out how to disable Embark NYC's push
notification.

My biggest problem now, however, is getting push notifications from
Letterpress at 4AM, because the person I play with is on the other side of the
continent.

There should be an adittional setting to require permission for a specified
window of time like, say, 1AM to 8AM.

------
xoail
May be developers should provide the frequency (x) of push notifications at
the time of requesting access. And Apple should ensure not more than x
notifications were sent to a device? Something along the lines: XYZ App would
like to send you push notifications. Freq: 2/day, 1/week, User set [Allow]
[Deny].

------
hamstergene
They should take Growl's approach of forcing developers to declare all
possible notifications that an app can send, so that they could examine their
texts and purposes during review process. It would also grant a possibility
for a user to enable/disable notifications individually.

------
marknutter
I rarely allow apps to send me push notifications. Only very selectively do I
allow it and even then my patience is short. For the average user this may be
an issue but I've found my approach handles the situation very nicely.

------
chrisdevereux
Would a simple "stop showing me these" on each notification work?

------
krickle
This is the number one reason I find my iPhone irritating (in practice) --
apps keep abusing even local notifications and those should be off by default
unless I allow it.

------
grandalf
I don't think there are really any good reasons to use push notifications. I
have them disabled on all the apps I install and don't feel like I'm missing
out on anything.

------
ck2
What I love on android is I can just strike-through any privilege I don't want
an app to have, like internet access. This might be a cyanogenmod-only feature
though.

------
cousin_it
This, and the crapware problem on Windows, seem like two instances of the same
underlying problem. What could a general solution look like?

~~~
count
Not buying/installing shitty apps by low rent developers or companys that have
poor reputations?

~~~
tomflack
Crapware is predominantly a problem on new PCs, where the vast majority of the
population just goes along with it. It needs a strong stand from Microsoft.

------
Wistar
First thing I turn off on all apps. If, after a spell, I find that I miss push
notifications on a given app, then I will turn it on.

------
zerostar07
Facebook apps went through the same problems years ago. I don't think facebook
ever managed to settle on a solution.

------
caycep
i generally say no to notifications. I don't have anything mission critical on
email that I need to know "right this second" and twitter and fb updates I
only want when I want them, otherwise they're a huge distraction..

------
drivebyacct2
For all the weird ad/spam accusations I've heard against Android, it shocks me
how much this seems to be an iOS issue. I can say I've never, ever had a
problem with this in Android, and if I did, most every app that I use that I
can think of allows me to enabled/disable different types of notifications
(FB/Twitter/etc). It's also a tiny bit amusing that one of the solutions is to
make the Settings more sane and make them live inside their application like
Android.

~~~
nollidge
I wonder if it's a UX difference. I don't use iOS, but looking at those
notifications, they seem obtrusive and demanding of your attention. Whereas in
Android, the notifications just accumulate in the tray at the top without
really getting in the way.

~~~
Symmetry
But even given that Android notification SPAM would be less annoying than iOS
notification SPAM seems to be, why don't I ever see sketchy Android apps even
trying that? Am I just not downloading apps from the wrong places?

~~~
chimeracoder
AirPush was one company that did (does?) sell ads as Android push
notifications. On the whole, they're really not that widely used anymore,
though - partly because Android users pushed back hard against them about a
year ago, IIRC, but also because the newest version or two of Android makes it
_really_ easy to identify the offending app and disable the notifications.

If I remember correctly, the pushback was before the new notification tray, so
it may have been Android's own response to the problem.

~~~
gagabity
It is now against the Play store developer TOS to have notifications unless
they clearly identify what App it is coming from, I think this makes things
like AirPush much more difficult to pull off.

