Promotional notifications have become pure spam. And often we cannot deactivate them without losing important

In August 2023 I asked Wallapop in X to stop sending absurd notifications of the type “Hello! How are you today? Have you slept like a baby?”. It is the most extreme example, due to its absurdity, that I remember of an endemic evil of our era: abuse of notifications until they become another form of spam.

Almost three years later, this problem is getting worse in the app industry, not less. The bank notifies me about home insurance before relevant events. Uber Eats offers me 30% on burgers I haven’t ordered. Spotify promotes a podcast to me that I don’t listen to. The situation has a technical name, notification fatigue, and an apparent solution: deactivate them.

There’s the catch. I can’t mute my bank’s promotions without also missing the notice of a suspicious charge. I can’t turn off the offers from the company that brings me dinner without being blindsided by the delivery person. Apps purposely mix transactional and advertising in the same channel, and rarely let you separate them without digging into the settings. You choose between two evils: put up with the spam or be left without the ads that matter.

This did not happen with SMS because sending an SMS cost money, although they were cheaper when sending mass messages. This minimum cost forced the issuer to think if it was worth it. He push it’s free. Sending you a hundred notifications costs the same as sending you one, so saturation is in the end the rational strategy of those who cannot conceive the inconvenience.

Apple expressly prohibits promotional notifications without opt-in since 2020 and Google has similar policies, but brands avoid them by disguising advertising as transactional (“your order is ready… and look at this 2×1”) or directly sending nonsense, because nobody audits anything. It is the same landscape as that of public transport: signs asking for silence, reserved seats, clear rules and no one enforcing them. They are there to make things beautiful.

And while, We have normalized that the bank that holds our money sends us advertising through the most intimate channel of the mobile phone, at no cost to him and at all costs to us. We continue deactivating notifications one by one, app by app, in which they allow us to segment by type of notification even if we search, until one day we miss something that did matter. That’s the part that doesn’t appear on any conversion panel.

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Featured image | Xataka