Gadgetory

so here's a question why are notification still such a pain to deal with I mean if you've been paying attention there have been lots of stories about how phones are hacking our brains and distracting us and keeping us from focusing on what we're supposed to be doing we're not getting too deep into it I think bad notifications are the result of bad economic incentives that have been created by bad software design they pop up on your lock screen they make your phone make noise they literally cover what you're looking at when they come in when you're using your phone all of that stuff demands your attention and all of that attention equals real money for app makers who don't necessarily have your best interests at heart and so well I think we can fix how we all set our notifications I also think we have to push companies like Apple and Google to fix their software design but before we can make demands of those companies we should actually try to identify what's wrong with that software design I want to start with Apple you might know all this stuff already but take a look at how these notifications work with a different I look at them and think do any of these notification options actually help you if you scroll through this thing it's just a giant unsorted list reverse chronological of all of your notifications with no sense of what's more important than the other thing and then if you get beyond that what do you do in one of these notifications pop up you swipe a little bit well that does one thing if you swipe too hard it jumps to a whole other screen or you can force press it and that pops up other options you can tap it and that might open it or maybe not who knows it's all just super confusing UI and it's not intuitive at all what you're supposed to do with it okay so let's take a look at some of these notifications here so the first one is just allow notifications you can turn that off that's like the nuclear option and I actually recommend you use that a bunch but say you need notifications then you've got sounds badge app icon show unlock screen show in history and then shows banners and that's a lot of options in fact how many options is that we should do some math here okay math times on the screen right here you can turn notifications on or off so that's two and then these are also on or off so there's two more options here here here and here so it's one two three four of those and then this one it's actually three because you can choose between these different things here so I thought this is going to be a factorial thing but since the order doesn't matter it's actually just a multiplication problem so this is 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 that's 2 to the fourth times 3 2 to the fourth is 16 times 3 it's 48 let's not forget about this guy up here because it toggles on everything else add that down plus 2 and up with 50 there are 50 different ways to set up notifications for any given app on your iPhone last but not least on top of all that there's this other whole mode called Do Not Disturb which turns everything off but not quite everything so you got to figure that out too I call all this confusion the mystery of the check boxes I mean the joke isn't that funny can we just turn the lights back on and go back to the video I mean it is a mystery but it's not not that big a mystery I guess is what I'm saying anyway Apple's philosophy is you should just let notifications flow by don't try and read everyone and don't try and organize your entire phone life through them but I think that's kind of dumb some notifications are super important so then the question is does anybody do it better so this is a part where I'm supposed to go really deep into the history of smart phones and show you how Symbian phones palm phones and blackberries and webOS phones and windows phones all handled notifications differently and where each innovation came from and I would love to do that but we don't have the time and also all of those phones are dead our IP all those phones instead we can just focus on how Android does things and I'm not going to go through all of it in as much detail as I did with the iPhone I just want to point out a few places where Android is smarter and I do have a caveat because this is Android and Android manufacturers are god-awful at sending out updates to their phones and being on the most recent version so we're just going to use the pixel two as an example got it cool let's start with the notification shade the first thing you're gonna notice is that it's ordered by priority so musics at the top and then there's messages and then there's all the other garbage so you know it's important right away the next thing is grouping and this is the most important thing that I love in Android is I have 50 notifications from Twitter they all get stacked up into this tiny little one-line thing and then I can expand it if I want to see it or dismiss all of it altogether all at once another thing that I love is if you're using the phone some notifications instead of putting a shade down and covering the top of your screen they can just be non interruptive they just pop a little icon of the notification tray and you can deal with it later which is great and then there's this new thing called channels which is a really complicated thing where all of an app's notification settings get put into a single screen where you can choose different notification options for all the different kinds of notifications app wants to send to you so you can choose whether it's high priority and makes your phone make noise or low priority and it's silent or it doesn't get notifications at all and you can do that not just for the whole app but for all the little things that an app wants to tell you I call these channel settings the Android version of the mystery of the check boxes no we're not no no yes we're doing it okay we're doing it great ah the check boxes are just as bad on Android in fact they're worse there's so many more check boxes on Android than there are on iOS so it's weird for me to praise it the difference that the end States of those check boxes for notifications are actually way more humane they're more in my control and they're less annoying than what happens to you on the iPhone the other reason I'm less than out of the Android notifications is that you can get to all those check boxes directly from the notification itself I'm not saying that Android notifications are perfect they do need work also in fact I would love to see some of that fancy machine learning that Google's always talking about applied more to the problem notifications look here's the truth notifications they're the new email they're just as important but email has all these tools for managing these messages it's got folders for sorting and stars and archiving and snoozing and all kinds of other crap we need to be empowered to manage our notifications just like we're empowered to manage our email or we need a whole different approach to solving this problem entirely I don't know earlier this year there were a lot of stories about how everyone's real mad at notifications they were in the New York Times so Farhad Manjoo said Apple should design a less addictive phone Nelly bulls did a really interesting story and people gray screening their phones so that all the color doesn't hack their lizard brains although lizards maybe don't see color I don't know look that up later anyway a bunch of this stuff comes from this movement called time well-spent that started with a guy named Tristan Harris who was a design at the cyst at Google and I don't disagree with any of it it is possible for your phone to put you in a permanent state of distraction the metaphor everybody uses is that it's like a slot machine you pulled out on the notification shade just like you pull on a lever on a slot machine I don't really like that metaphor because I think it takes away too much power from you the person who I don't know owns the slot machine the phone you should only give them that power if they deliver something really valuable to you and too often they don't but Apple I'm sorry you need to help us out here there's only so much that we as users can do given all of the options you've given us because notifications they're not going away and just treating them as little puffy clouds floating by and our lock screens that isn't going to work I've got a few people I need to thank for this video I want to thank Vlad Sabah for coming up with a metaphor of iPhone notifications being puffy clouds floating away patrocle Pato thank you for fixing my math I had it super wrong and you saved me also thanks to former verge reporter Jeff Blagdon who in a completely different context came up with the phrase the mystery of two check boxes which I just deeply loved and of course thank you for watching