I limit mine to messages and calls because I don’t like the distraction of tons of notifications. Curious what others do
none.
I keep my phone on silent no vibrate.
My father died three days before I checked my phone. my voicemail was filled with calls from him, “answer your phone boy!”, " I’m dying son, please send help!", “you were always your mother’s favorite…”
the silence is deafening–
SHIT there’s another lost kid alert!
Other than the necessities, the one app I allow notifications for is the C-SPAN app. They send maybe 1 notification a week for something like a live presidential address on a news event.
Anything that might create excessive notifications (social media/news) I use as a web app on top of not enabling notifications.
Only texts and calls are audible notifications. Everything else is slient.
Messages, phone calls, cameras, financial alerts, and a game discord (only server and game news specifically).
None at all. My phone is for looking up things, and for looking at pictures that make me happy. I don’t need notifications for either of those, lol.
Been trying to decide on what to allow on my computer/home server.
But on my phone I allow texts, emails (don’t get many of them), discord (dms and certain chats), phone, and that is probably it. So just communication applications.
I have it on by default, until its abused. Once it’s abused it’s never getting it back
I don’t pro actively block any of them, because I do appreciate reminders, but once something starts to get annoying, it’s cut off.
Anything time-sensitive. Emails, calls, messages, and calendar reminders. Then I have a Sleep setting that silences all of them when I go to bed.
wait, you guys are blocking notifications? Are you allowed to do that??? /j
No Ads
If a notification sends me an ad, I will block the app and also review whether I even need it. Anyone willing to shovel ads at me in my notifications is not my friend.
Other stuff is simple:
- If I need to know the information right away I allow a notification. Stuff like calls, messages, server monitoring, security, etc. Notifications that only fire when actively using or just after using an app also get to stay on if they are useful.
- If it’s not urgent, I set a reminder in my to do list to review it on a recurring basis, for example “check Mastadon, weekly, Saturday”
Follow up question: how do you handle apps that have persistent notifications?
Most apps with persistent notifications that I used allowed you to turn off that notification in the app’s settings. Others utilize androids notification category management to allow you to disable the persistent notification.
My sports betting apps. Need to know when the hot games are on🔥
I have my phone permanently on Do Not Disturb, and anytime I have a notification I don’t like, I block the app from sending notifications.
I basically have email, Signal, and missed phone calls left over (but voice messages are blocked).
I have my email silenced. The red dots are allowed but nothing else. Too much spam
Messaging apps, calendar, the ringer for phone calls, my Lemmy app ( although Connect for Lemmt seems hit and miss on delivering notifications, which is fine by me.)
I allow notifications from my email provider, my bank, and IMs - although I disable group notifications. Everything else is prohibited.
I only use FOSS apps, so never had to block any apps from sending notifications.
I’m sure FOSS apps are less intrusive, but they still use notifications surely? I’d generally want a calendar or messager app to send me notifications, but I might want to block a specific app depending on my use case.
Well, I don’t know what we’re counting here. Generally, if FOSS apps have notifications which one might perceive as annoying, they’ll have a checkbox in the in-app settings, so I don’t need to *block* them.
There is one scenario, where I’ve blocked notifications, which is when an app wants to run in the background, then it has to put up a permanent notification. I hadn’t counted that, since that’s an Android requirement.Aside from that, IMHO it’s pretty clear-cut whether notifications are either necessary or subjective or not a good idea, so apps with user interests in mind can get that right quite well.
