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"title": "What Apple and Google are doing to your push notifications | Jacques Corby-Tuech",
"excerpt": "I wrote recently about what Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple are doing to your email : how four providers stopped being transport layers and turned into active intermediaries between brands and their customers, parsing, ranking, summarising, and increasingly answering on the recipient's behalf.\n\nThe same thing is happening to push, with two companies in control instead of four. Apple and Google run the only two pipes that matter, and every notification you have ever sent has passed through one of them. Over the last five years the on-device model that now sits between delivery and your lock screen began summarising, reordering and, on some surfaces, rewriting it.\n\nPush begins as a battery problem. In June 2009 Scott Forstall stood at WWDC and made the case that an iPhone could not afford to let every installed application maintain its own background poll against a remote server. The proposal, delayed from its initial September 2008 announcement after Apple decided to restructure the underlying infrastructure for scale, was the Apple Push Notification Service, a single persistent TLS connection from each device to Apple, over which any registered third party could deliver alerts.",
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"text": "If my phone interrupts me, it should either mean someone genuinely needs my attention right now or it should not be disrupting me at all. That's my notification set up.<p>Apps allowed to receive push notifications<p>Phone, \nMessages, \nWhatsapp, \nApple Health, \n[brand] bank.<p>That concludes the list.<p>There is no reason any other app needs to be able to instantly ping me. Most apps are not notifying you because something matters; they are notifying you because they want your attention.<p>I do not need notifications about streaks, sales, recommendations, delivery updates etc. All that can wait until I choose to open the app. It is not urgent enough to justify interrupting me.",
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"body": "If my phone interrupts me, it should either mean someone genuinely needs my attention right now or it should not be disrupting me at all. That's my notification set up. Apps allowed to receive push notifications Phone, Messages, Whatsapp, Apple Health, [brand] bank. That concludes the list. There is no reason any other app needs to be able to instantly ping me. Most apps are not notifying you because something matters; they are notifying you because they want your attention. I do not need notifications about streaks, sales, recommendations, delivery updates etc. All that can wait until I choose to open the app. It is not urgent enough to justify interrupting me.",
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"raw_body": "If my phone interrupts me, it should either mean someone genuinely needs my attention right now or it should not be disrupting me at all. That's my notification set up.<p>Apps allowed to receive push notifications<p>Phone, \nMessages, \nWhatsapp, \nApple Health, \n[brand] bank.<p>That concludes the list.<p>There is no reason any other app needs to be able to instantly ping me. Most apps are not notifying you because something matters; they are notifying you because they want your attention.<p>I do not need notifications about streaks, sales, recommendations, delivery updates etc. All that can wait until I choose to open the app. It is not urgent enough to justify interrupting me.",
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"text": "I feel like this article reads like the author is upset that Apple + Google prevent / control certain types of notifications (read: spam)<p>> Cross-sell, upsell, education and discovery can work on push<p>Push notifications should <i>only</i> be for transactional notifications. I don't want another inbox for junk.",
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"body": "I feel like this article reads like the author is upset that Apple + Google prevent / control certain types of notifications (read: spam) > Cross-sell, upsell, education and discovery can work on push Push notifications should only be for transactional notifications. I don't want another inbox for junk.",
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"raw_body": "I feel like this article reads like the author is upset that Apple + Google prevent / control certain types of notifications (read: spam)<p>> Cross-sell, upsell, education and discovery can work on push<p>Push notifications should <i>only</i> be for transactional notifications. I don't want another inbox for junk.",
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"text": "> For most of the channel's history they did very little of it visibly. The architecture was permissive of intervention; they simply chose not to intervene much. That restraint is what ended.<p>I guess it wasn't always visible, but they were intervening in some for or another since the beginning. At WhatsApp, push delay/suppression/coalescing was something we were always monitoring, and IIRC, it was part of the system since at least when I joined in 2011. If you don't work within the system, your users' messages don't get delivered timely.",
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"body": "> For most of the channel's history they did very little of it visibly. The architecture was permissive of intervention; they simply chose not to intervene much. That restraint is what ended. I guess it wasn't always visible, but they were intervening in some for or another since the beginning. At WhatsApp, push delay/suppression/coalescing was something we were always monitoring, and IIRC, it was part of the system since at least when I joined in 2011. If you don't work within the system, your users' messages don't get delivered timely.",
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"raw_body": "> For most of the channel's history they did very little of it visibly. The architecture was permissive of intervention; they simply chose not to intervene much. That restraint is what ended.<p>I guess it wasn't always visible, but they were intervening in some for or another since the beginning. At WhatsApp, push delay/suppression/coalescing was something we were always monitoring, and IIRC, it was part of the system since at least when I joined in 2011. If you don't work within the system, your users' messages don't get delivered timely.",
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"text": "> None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified.<p>Sounds fine with me?",
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"body": "> None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified. Sounds fine with me?",
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"raw_body": "> None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified.<p>Sounds fine with me?",
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"text": "> Over fifteen years the channel has been rebuilt around one assumption: the receiver's attention is a scarce resource the platform is obliged to defend. … As a sender you are on the wrong side of that assumption, whichever way the control moved.<p>Fascinating how the author openly frames the situation as the sender and receiver’s interests being opposed.",
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"body": "> Over fifteen years the channel has been rebuilt around one assumption: the receiver's attention is a scarce resource the platform is obliged to defend. … As a sender you are on the wrong side of that assumption, whichever way the control moved. Fascinating how the author openly frames the situation as the sender and receiver’s interests being opposed.",
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"raw_body": "> Over fifteen years the channel has been rebuilt around one assumption: the receiver's attention is a scarce resource the platform is obliged to defend. … As a sender you are on the wrong side of that assumption, whichever way the control moved.<p>Fascinating how the author openly frames the situation as the sender and receiver’s interests being opposed.",
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"text": "I feel like this article reads like the author is upset that Apple + Google prevent / control certain types of notifications (read: spam)<p>> Cross-sell, upsell, education and discovery can work on push<p>Push notifications should <i>only</i> be for transactional notifications. I don't want another inbox for junk.",
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"text": "> For most of the channel's history they did very little of it visibly. The architecture was permissive of intervention; they simply chose not to intervene much. That restraint is what ended.<p>I guess it wasn't always visible, but they were intervening in some for or another since the beginning. At WhatsApp, push delay/suppression/coalescing was something we were always monitoring, and IIRC, it was part of the system since at least when I joined in 2011. If you don't work within the system, your users' messages don't get delivered timely.",
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"text": "> None of this bites evenly. The editing falls hardest on broadcast and promotional push; the notifications people actually want tend to pass through untouched or amplified.<p>Sounds fine with me?",
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