Apps never close. They are hungry for engagement. They want you to know that your favorite items are on sale, that you haven’t practiced your Spanish today, that your delivery driver is five stops away, that your kid at daycare just had a blast – all day, all at once. Welcome to a place we all live in, a place called Notification Hell. We haven’t always lived here. For a while, companies like Apple wouldn’t let app developers run wild with the power to demand our attention at any time of the day. They insisted that power should be used for good, not evil. That didn’t last long. App developers are now allowed to send us marketing notifications if we’ve opted in. And guess what: if you’ve opted in to receive notifications at all, you’ve opted in to a lot of them. The call is even coming from inside the home now – Apple is promoting its services in the settings menus and Samsung is trying to sell you a new phone… while you’re using your Samsung phone. There really is nowhere to hide. The road to notification hell is paved with well-intentioned digital assistants It’s not just the ads that are the problem. The digital assistants on our phones are trying hard to learn our behavior and predict our every move. Probably because they’re robots, they don’t really understand what’s useful and what’s not. Like when Siri sees that I have a flight on my calendar, she suggests a shortcut to put my phone in flight mode. Right after that, it asks if I want to call the meeting on my calendar: my flight. The road to notification hell is paved with well-intentioned digital assistants. It’s not a helper, but Google Photos often commits notification crimes. It’s always learning new tricks, like how to identify a beer or a latte in a photo, and then pesters you to see how it can identify all the beer and latte photos you’ve taken. He also wants to know a lot when he finds a bunch of similar shots of my cat sleeping on various pieces of furniture, bringing them to attention uninvited, like a dog that found a stick. My brother in Christ, I took the pictures. I know they are similar. The developers of our operating system are not completely indifferent to our suffering. they threw us two lifelines. On iOS, you can aggregate time-insensitive notifications into a daily digest delivered once a day. You can also set focus modes – the UI for which is its own hell – or have some apps deliver notifications silently unless they’re time-sensitive. But if you do that, you have to solve a puzzle first. Answer me these three questions… Not the most user friendly interface. That sums up our situation: we are trapped in notification hell and there will be no rescue. We have some meager tools in our hands, but the onus is on us to find a way out. By the time I figure out my notification settings, I know I’m in for the long haul. For now, it’s just a comfort to know there are others with me, because misery loves company.
