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by runarberg 1664 days ago
You can say the same thing about email, but yet there are plenty of legitimate use cases. Cases include chat apps like slack, you might want to see when someone has messaged you even though you might not have the slack tab open. Are you attending a music festival and have the schedule open for an artist you want to see, well the concerts have been delayed 20 min, would be handy to get a push notification telling you that.
1 comments
PaulHoule 1664 days ago
I find it hard to believe that I would get notified for anything useful but I am absolutely certain I will be notified incessantly for things that don’t matter. In fact the later spoils it for the former because the later train people to ignore notifications.

For instance any shop I create an account with (Best Buy, Ulta Beauty, …) thinks I want to hear from them once a day or more often. If they tried to keep it relevant it would be one thing but it is really a conversation where one side talks talks and talks and the other isn’t listening. Right now on Arstechnia’s Dealmaster they are talking like it is news that Amazon Fire tablets on sale but they ought to just send me a notice when Fire tablets aren’t on sale.

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1_player 1664 days ago
We're talking about PWAs the user chooses to install. Of course they want to get notified. In my case I want to run Fastmail and WhatsApp. What use are they to me if they don't notify me when I get a message.

People in this thread keep confusing notification request from random websites with notification requests from web apps you WANT to get notified from. It's a thing. And all browser offer a per-site preference. Having PWA support doesn't mean being spammed by every site you visit.

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PaulHoule 1664 days ago
It seems like this framework is addressing that but so far a PWA is a disorganized patchwork of features that might seem to fit together if you squint. For instance the user has no control over how much IndexedDB storage is used if any, and that the only thing you do have consent for is notifications…. Which normally is a request to spam, maybe 10% of the time it is a ‘real’ PWA but I am sure the majority of those are spam too.

People who use the web are used to being spammed at every turn so naturally they are going to expect any feature usually used for spam to be used for spamming. It doesn’t help that PWA hasn’t had clear branding that ordinary people would understand.

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