A Common Sense Media report finds about half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications a day. Some get nearly 5,000 in 24 hours. What does that do to their brains?
Are people really not turning notifications off? I don’t even have notifications on for messaging apps
It’s not difficult if you’re on newer versions of iOS and Android. It’s easy to customise notifications or turn them off altogether. If you’re less techy, then it’s more difficult.
The problem is the apps assuming they can send you tons of notifications by default. Plus some apps keep adding new notifications types and assume that people are interested in them (for example shopping apps starting to suggest random products or Instagram advertising the creator’s broadcast channels).
It’s good we’re highlighting the mental burden of constant notifications as some people are not aware of it.
The funny thing is this article talks about kids. My Mom is in her 70s and I maintain her phone and she currently uses a pixel 6, so it’s the latest os of course. Whenever I see her, I have to declutter her notifications. They’re constant. Apps and websites have gotten more noisy and aggressive in prompting users to enable notifications or sending constant push crap and I don’t think most people know how to disable them while retaining what they’re actually wanting to get.
Yea I dont get it, just do it a little bit at a time.
Whenever I get a notification that’s annoying (ex. Remember to play this game!!), I’ll long press and turn them off. Sometimes it’s important but not sound/vibration important, so I’ll just turn them silent.
Now the only notifications I get are things that I actually need.
I prefer to give them a chance first. As soon as an app abuses that privilege, the permission to show notifications gets instantly revoked.
If it’s a somewhat useful notification, but I don’t need to read it right now, it gets scheduled and I’ll read that in the afternoon if I feel like it. If it’s a serious offense like spamming, then that right is gone forever. The app may also get a negative review as result.
Now that I look at my notification settings, I can easily identify three groups:
- Serious apps that never send me anything, or if they do, it’s actually something I need to know. There are surprisingly many apps like this.
- Semi-serious apps that send notifications a bit too frequently and they aren’t really that important anyway. These get scheduled. If I ignore the notifications for a week, nothing bad will happen.
- Back-stabbing cannibalistic monetary predator apps. They send nothing but trash and land mines, and they do it all the time. Their business model is usually based on manipulation, misdirection, deception and straight up lies. They try to trick you into clicking some stuff and then rely on you forgetting to cancel the subscription later. I don’t have many apps like this, but all of their notifications are forever blocked. If you have a lot of this cancer of the app store type of garbage, I can totally understand why all notifications are blocked for all apps.
