iPhone Notification Spam is Awful

December 02, 2022

The amount of spam I receive in my iPhone notification screen/center seems to grow daily. The big offenders in the past 24 hours:

  • Starbucks
  • Warby Parker
  • Target
  • Dunkin’
  • Uber
  • Instagram
  • Amazon

Why It Matters

If I place an order with an app I am more than happy to get the notification with updates. The problem is when the same app sends me advertising. The prevalence of this practice has grown which means I am increasingly turning notifications off even from apps that would otherwise be helpful to have notifications from.

News Alerts are Also Irrelevant

I have long been a fan of the New York Times app but the news notifications they send tend to include not breaking news. If a new war is starting or there is a massive food recall then that is breaking news. The latest investigation by their team might be an interesting article, but I do not need a push notification about it.

Apple Does Not Care

While Apple used to keep these at bay in the app store, they make more money when their app providers do. They pay lip service to providing more settings to tweak notifications, but then app makers create new ways to deliver irrelevant notifications. I do not think they are likely to tame these.

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This work by Matt Zagaja is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.