[sfn42]

I like to disable most notifications, but I'm confused about the Uber eats thing. If I'm a restaurant and I take orders via Uber eats, I probably want to be notified about new orders. That seems quite important to me. It's not the kind of thing you can leisurely discover an hour or two later. It's on the same level of importance as a customer walking into the restaurant. I can't really imagine many things more important than that.

Similarly if I'm on the receiving end I need to know that the delivery is here. I want my food and the courier wants to get going. I live in an apartment building, so I like being downstairs ready to pick up my order when they arrive.

So that's something I want to get notified about. I don't use Uber eats but I use Wolt, where I can monitor the couriers location and get a notification when they're close. I don't turn those off because these are actually important in my eyes. There's a real person potentially waiting for me right now.

Snapchat on the other hand gets muted immediately. Whoever came up with notifications for someone typing should be locked up. Not to mention all the bullshit like "some influencer or whatever posted something" notifications. I barely want to know when my friends sent me something.

[WorldMaker]

I like Apple's growing approach of distinguishing "Time Sensitive" notifications and "Live Activity" notifications from all the other types of notifications from an app.

An Uber Eats delivery is a "Live Activity" with a tracker that is sticky on the lock screen (and Apple Watch "activity area"). That makes a lot of sense. "Deals" and other random garbage Uber Eats wants to send to me aren't "Live Activity" so can be filed to later/slower delivery.

A buzzer notification from my condo buildings front door is a "Time Sensitive" notification that gets priority. But that same app's "weekly neighbor updates" isn't and can be filtered differently. Those things are great.

I can send most notifications to "Notification Summaries" which give me digests of all the notifications in roughly ~4hr chunks. There are very few things that I need faster than that (esp. when apps properly support "Time Sensitive" and "Live Activities").

Of course, with great power comes great responsibility. I've caught LinkedIn abusing "Time Sensitive" notifications (because of course it would, LinkedIn loves notification spam too much not to) and entirely revoked its privilege to send them.

[sfn42]

That sounds pretty great, especially if it's handled from the developers side and we don't have to customize it.

I know I can customize notifications for my apps but when I go to look at it an app has like 50 different types and I just don't care enough to deal with that so I just mute the whole app instead.