For more than and a half, the applications of our mobiles They are perfect machines to suck time that hook us with techniques such as Scroll infinite. We have ended with A generation that lives decentralized Even when we do not receive relevant notifications of work, school, friends or family.
And that is precisely one of the big problems we face today: an enormous amount of useless, irrelevant notifications and in many absurd cases that kidnap our mobile.
What’s happening. It is increasingly common to receive unwanted notifications on our mobile. And the pity is that, in the face of email, there is no Spam filter. The problem is that there are applications of banks, neoboncos, transport, electronic commerce, food at home or second -hand sale, for putting examples, which do not stop riding advertising notifications without relation to the reason why they are installed.
The problem. The engineer and hacker Jaime Gómez-Obregón told Recently the behavior of some of the most popular applications you had installed on your iPhone. Blablacar sent him promotions notifications, despite having deactivated trade communications. Without authorizing offers, they arrived from Cabify, Uber or N26.
His followers told him that the same thing happens with Revolution, Wallapop and Banks Applications such as BBVA. A server can talk about your experience with OpenBank: receive more promotional notifications than bizums, payments or transfers, despite having requested that they do not send me more advertising to your customer service by phone.
When deactivating notifications as a final measure is dangerous. We talk about kidnapping because, although both in iOS and Android we can deactivate the notifications of the applications we choose, the important thing is what we lose in doing so. If I am waiting for the Uber driver to arrive, I can’t deactivate his applications. If I am waiting for a possible Wallapop buyer to respond to which I am interested in selling something quickly, I cannot deactivate notifications.
The same happens if I am waiting for the notification of my payroll or a transfer in the bank or the message of a Blablacar driver for a journey that I cannot do with any other means of transport, and that of not seeing it, I risk not being able to reach a destination. In the end, it is similar to deactivating notifications in a WhatsApp group where a lot about important things are discussed. With the difference of our contacts they know that they can talk to us in private to let us know that something relevant is cooked and we have not heard.
In Wallapop you can individually deactivate promotional notices. Without losing user messages notifications.
The solution we expect and does not arrive (with exceptions). The rain of promotional notifications is easily solved, if applications developers want. In the APP notification settings it can be offered separately stop receiving notifications of direct messages, a public mention, or advertising. The problem of many applications is that everything gets into a sack, and you cannot deactivate only advertising, or not in an obvious way (without having to send mails, make calls, etc.
In this sense, my partner Javier Lacort complained on Twitter a long time ago Wallapop behavior. Without defining the type of promotional message he was learning, Javier learned thanks to The response of a follower That Wallapop is one of the companies that incur this good proposed practice: it lets you deactivate the promotions separately. The general reality? Insufferable.
Google is clear that it is wrong. Apple not so much. On its documentation website on developers, Google makes clear “When not using a notification“The reality is that with their services they send similar messages. Apple prohibited notifications with ads until 2020. Changed the rulesand now Send notifications promoting savings in tickets to see ‘F1’ In the portfolio application. Even so, in the Standard 4.5.4 They modified continue to mention the following:
Push notifications should not be used for promotional or direct marketing purposes, unless customers have explicitly accepted to receive them through a consent text shown in the user interface of your application.
This is how Google explains to developers the bad practices on promotional notifications.
And when requesting the notification permit, Wallapop, for example, does not inform in any way that it will later send promotional messages (although in your case we can deactivate them separately).
When asking for notifications, applications do not report that they can contain promotional content, as Apple establishes in their terms.
In full era of AI, both Google and Apple could implement filters to detect notifications not requested by the user and whose relevance is very questionable. They could also provide the system of functions to filter keywords or list of words allowed and prohibited according to each application.
It is just what he does Bullkill Notification Manager on Androidand its users mention being Very happy Just to combat promotions. Android offers control of notifications by category, but, again, it is something that the developer has to activate so that the user can choose what type of messages he wants according to the app.
Image | Generated with chatgpt and Jonas Leupe in Unspash
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