Gadgetory

so you know what really steams my buns app notifications I mean okay sure you want to know when you get an angry email from your boss or when someone on Twitter responded to one of your hot takes but why does it game that I hardly ever play think that it's okay to send me a dozen reminders every day to inform me that I hardly ever play it I mean weren't notifications designed to be useful back in 2003 blackberry started pushing out emails so that you wouldn't have to keep checking your messages over and over to see if you had anything important to deal with and that was a godsend so you would think that the likes of Google and Apple would have found a way to keep the original spirit of the push notification alive but this is 2019 we're even cat underwear can be monetized so of course developers decided that push notifications would be a great way not to let us know when something important was happening but rather to maintain a constant presence in our minds and therefore our wallets and it's having a real-world impact app and notification fatigue are real things now did you know that according to one survey over 70% of users said that six or more notifications from one app in a week would cause them to stop using that app altogether but nevertheless developers think it's a great idea to keep shoving more and more notifications down our throats I mean is there an emptier feeling than seeing your phone line up with a tender notification thinking someone might finally be interested just to find out they're trying to sell you more crappy features you don't need not that I would know anything about that of course anyway not only do ab developers keep sending you notifications because more eyeballs on their apps means more money but the people running the big app marketplaces so that's the aforementioned Apple in Google they really have no incentive to stop the avalanche of garbage showing up at the top of our screens because why would they not only do Google and Apple take a cut when you buy a premium app they also take 30% of the money that you spend on in-app purchases so more screen time increases the likely that you'll buy more like gold coins for that stupid tile-matching game that you love so much and then even if you don't do that it makes it more likely that you'll engage with their own paid or ad supported services and what better way to assure that we are all staring at our screens like a bunch of brainless sheep than to have our phones chirping us with notifications all the time now to be fair there are ways to turn off notifications for problematic apps and you can do it here on Android and here on iOS but for goodness sake there has to be a better way to do this other than us wasting time that we could spend doing literally anything else digging through menus and disabling notifications one at a time or even worse trying to figure out androids confusing new notification category system now individual apps also allow you to alter these settings but like social media platforms for example are notorious for having such an endless amount of customization in their notification menus that it is nearly impossible to disable the spam you don't want without accidentally missing something important so many users just end up leaving it on now I really don't think it would be that hard for Google and Apple with their billions of dollars to realize that people do remove irritating apps and also to develop an algorithm to separate out the unimportant stuff from the good stuff I mean Google literally did this for your Gmail inbox already and then probably the craziest part of all this for me is that while I can understand the motivation for stuffing more spam down our throats what is up with the apps that failed to deliver the notifications we asked for why is it that my chat app will neglect to send me pings for two hours then hit me with all of them at once when I happen to open it or what about YouTube's brilliant strategy of picking and choosing which channels to bother informing me about a new video from I mean I clicked subscribe I actually want to hear about it unfortunately right now other than training in notification blocker foo I don't have a great solution for you but stay tuned because here at linus media group we are hard at work on the tech quickie freemium notification blocker at every time a notification comes through it'll read it send that data back our servers then send you a notification announcing that the notification has been blocked and if that sounds good you're wrong that sounds horrible and you are part of the problem speaking of part of the problem don't be part of the problem with bad hair Dollar Shave Club makes everyone's everyday grooming routines whether they're showering brushing your teeth and shaving just better Dollar Shave Club has everything you need toothpaste Body Wash razors etc to help you look feel and smell your best and they're basically giving away their daily 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