GoKawiilLooking back, I was surprised to see it’s been more than eight years since I put my iPhone on a notifications diet. My iPhone is a far calmer place because of this.
But there’s another long-standing issue with notifications: there’s still no way to separate useful ones from marketing and other junk …
I first made a feature request about this back in 2020.
I don’t need to be notified when our robo-cleaner has completed its cleaning cycle, and I most definitely don’t want to be spammed by eBay. I do, however, want both apps to be able to send me useful notifications. If I’m selling something on eBay, it’s useful to be notified when I receive a question about it, as well as when a sale goes through. If I’m buying something through eBay, it’s handy to know when it’s been dispatched. The same with the cleaner: if it gets stuck somewhere, or needs the bin to be emptied, or the filter to be changed, those are all notifications I want to receive. So what I really want are tiered notifications.
The final straw to me revisiting the topic now was the WordPress iPhone app Jetpack sending me junk notifications about “unlocked achievements” on my tango blog. For example, it recently told me I had earned the Globetrotter badge for receiving views from 50 different countries, and even more randomly an Early Bird one for “publishing five posts between 5am and 8am.” WTAF?
What I wanted back then was for Apple to require developers to classify their notifications into three categories and then allow users to specify which of these they allow:
Exceptional
Routine
Marketing
Coincidentally or not, Apple has fulfilled quite a lot of our feature requests over the years, but not this one. However, the advent of Apple Intelligence features in iOS 27 does provide a whole new opportunity to tackle this problem.
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