What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications

Overall sentiment on push notifications

• Many see current push usage as abusive: notifications are overwhelmingly spammy, promotional, or “engagement” hooks.
• Strong consensus that push should be rare and valuable; most apps are not important enough to deserve interrupting the user.
• Several say they silence or uninstall any app that sends a single unwanted notification.

Transactional vs promotional use

• Broad agreement: notifications should be transactional (security alerts, deliveries, ride arrivals, appointments), not marketing.
• Biggest pain point: apps that mix critical and promotional messages in the same channel (banks, ride‑sharing, delivery apps).
• Some think broadcast/marketing via push is inherently illegitimate; others note some users do explicitly opt in.

Platform control and intermediation

• Concern that Apple/Google increasingly sit between sender and recipient, editing, delaying, or suppressing notifications.
• Split views:
  • Pro: platforms defending user attention from abusive senders; more filtering is “mission accomplished”.
  • Contra: platforms gain opaque, unaccountable power and become toll collectors, similar to search and email.

User controls and UX (Android vs iOS)

• Android praised for notification channels and tools like Buzzkill, though many apps mislabel or abuse channels.
• iOS criticized for coarse controls and lack of OS‑level separation of transactional vs promotional notifications, despite some app‑level options and features like Notification Summary, Focus, Live Activities.
• Strong view that sane defaults matter; most users will never “tune their setup”.

Privacy, surveillance, and architecture

• Discussion notes all standard mobile push goes through APNS/FCM; developers can’t bypass it on stock iOS/Android.
• References to government access to push metadata/content and the lack of any way for app developers or users to prevent this.
• Some de‑Google or use WebSockets/self‑hosted approaches (GrapheneOS, UnifiedPush), trading battery for independence.

Coping strategies and desired features

• Common strategies: permanent Do Not Disturb, extreme whitelists (only calls/messages from select contacts, banks, calendar), disabling almost all app notifications.
• Desired features:
  • OS‑enforced separation of marketing vs transactional channels.
  • Ability to mark push as spam and penalize abusers.
  • App‑level network firewalls and permission to revoke network access.
  • Email‑like inbox, filters, or even LLM‑based classifiers for notifications.