Hacker News

points by miguel-muniz 3 days ago | 0 comments

Unfortunately pretty much any surface to contact you will be abused to try to sell you something. It started with phone calls and text messages, but quickly in recent years it's been happening to smart phone notifications.

For example, for DoorDash, I should just receive order status notifications but they ping me every few days to try out a local restaurant. They want to remind me that their app exists on my phone and I can spend money with them.

Ideally I should be able to turn off these kind of marketing notifications separate from functional notifications, but not all apps are this kind.

It makes me realize that email is a much better system for this. You have an entire archive of every email you receive, with the ability to search, filter, forward, and even set up custom rules to delete items containing certain text, for example.

Yes it's a hassle to manage an email inbox, but this kind of flexibility gives users a lot of power that phone, sms, or native notifications lack.

[–] nvme0n1p1 3 days ago

I gate all my scammy SaaS apps behind Hail: https://github.com/aistra0528/Hail

It unfreezes doordash (or any app) when you explicitly open it, and freezes it again after you don't use the app for an hour.

You can't get spam notifications if the app isn't even allowed to run.

[–] SllX 3 days ago

DoorDash is both better & worse (mostly worse with the slimmest silver lining) than you’ve portrayed. Inside the app settings you can turn off all the marketing notifications. They’ll even mostly respect that setting with the following caveats:

1) they will give you a recurring pop up banner when you open the app to turn on all notifications, making it sound like it’s just for delivery notifications, even if you already have those turned on. You have to ignore it.

2) at least once recently, they just toggled them all on, on my behalf, anyway. I found out after receiving a random marketing notification. Then I turned them back off & it hasn’t happened since.

3) there have been occasions where even with granular controls, I don’t receive the delivery notifications if I have the marketing ones turned off. Hasn’t happened in a while, but now I always keep that in mind that it’s a possibility.

[–] robrtsql 3 days ago

> Ideally I should be able to turn off these kind of marketing notifications separate from functional notifications, but not all apps are this kind.

Even if they _do_ offer that sort of granularity, these apps introduce a new 'category' of notification everyday, and the new category is always opt-out, so there will always be a small stream of notifications leaking through.

[–] gumby 3 days ago

On my iPhone I use a “focus” that just rejects communication from a set of bad actors. If I order a pizza or something I disable the focus ND RE-enable it when the pizza arrives.

If you send me one spam sms or notification you go immediately on the list.

Works fine except the notification identifier is different for ipad and phone so I have to add those apps twice.

[–] TFNA 3 days ago

On an Android phone, put corporate apps like food delivery (or supermarket customer cards etc.) that you don't want to think about except when you are actually using them, in a separate user profile. Then they will stay out of sight and out of mind.

[–] thirtygeo 3 days ago

Samsung doesn't allow this..

[–] TFNA 3 days ago

Separate user accounts have been a feature in stock Android for years now, and a quick search shows that Samsung supports this same stock Android feature.

[–] Gigachad 3 days ago

I think in the future you’ll just have a local AI model determine if any message is an advert or a genuine communication and it just filters the ads out for you.

[–] hackingonempty 3 days ago

https://paulgraham.com/spam.html

[–] jonhohle 3 days ago

I’ve noticed lately that both Walmart _and_ Amazon use push notifications for advertisements right next to order updates. Both allow you to turn off the advertising (I think), but opt everyone in by default.

iOS has gotten reasonably good about tracking packages in wallet outside of any other app, but then again, wallet has sent advertisements about other Apple things.

[–] riggsdk 3 days ago

I got really surprised when Wolt suddenly gave me a notification on iPhone that said "Welcome to Germany! Discover all the places you can order from". How on earth would it know I had crossed the border? I hadn't interacted with the app for several days and the iOS location services setting is explicitly set to "While Using". That must mean Wolt is actively telling iOS it's being "in use" even though it's not. Really really scummy behavior that should be illegal.