1. On the Flaw in iOS’ Notification System

    Over the last few months, momentum behind the calls of ‘iOS’ notification system is broken’ has been growing. Plenty of people have written that it’s impossible to use iOS with a large number of notifications (the clue being to turn them off). However, switching Push Notifications off doesn’t actually fix the problem. See, the tech blogosphere has this belief that iOS’ notification system is broken purely for the tech elite who’re busy using every single check-in service on the planet. They’re oblivious to the question of whether they need all those notifications, but also to the fundamental reason that the notification system in iOS is broken.

    Quite simply, the modal alerts that iOS currently uses are broken not because tech bloggers everywhere are struggling with notifications all the time, but because the iOS system fails to account for the contextual areas in which showing a notification is actually impeding your use of the device. For example: when you’re on the phone and an SMS comes in. I’ve never once been on a phonecall where, after concluding the call, knowing I got an SMS from my fiancée was more important than hanging up the call.

    Again: when you fire up Mail.app on an iDevice, and Mail freaks out at the lack of a data connection. It proceeds to show me the same error alert for every single email account on my phone, forcing you to click “OK” for every single account.1

    So when reading complaints about iOS’ notification system being completely and utterly broken, don’t confuse it with tech bloggers failing to say ‘No’ to services that want to send them Push Notifications. The notifications in iOS are flawed at a basic ‘I want to use this device as a phone’ level and any push notification junkie is simply seeing an exacerbation of this flaw.2

    1. I’m aware that I’m not the typical iPhone user, given that I have 6 email accounts on my phone. But a modest survey of my parents’ phones reveals a couple of email addresses each that they use. Your mileage may vary etc. ↩

    2. Services providing push notifications also bear the responsibility for offering smart defaults as to when to push to a users device by default. ↩

    Posted on Monday April 25th, 2011