Yeah exactly this. If you want to tell me about something that's legitimately important to me, fine. But don't remind me to come play your game or advertise your other products via push. This will result in an immediate uninstall. Zynga games have been banned from my devices for this reason.
Frankly even offering them the leeway to define what is legitimately important to you is too much in my opinion.
There will always be companies out there ready to argue 'but you DO legitimately need to know about our important new fubar app!'.
I would be interested in a site that collected reviews of the notifications-usage of various apps so that I could check there before downloading. In a perfect world there would be a rating option for this ('Notifications Abuse Rating') but that'll never happen.
The article misses the fact that the notifications all have a CTA "slide to view" but have no affordance to dismiss. I don't have an iPhone so I don't know how to dismiss those messages without viewing the app. My Android, though, always has slide-to-dismiss and click-to-view.
How many of these 40% CTR are from viewers who are frustrated that they can't figure out how to dismiss the message without clicking-through?
