I Hope Web Push Doesn't Suck
The Web Push API is finally being fully adopted by Apple in iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, removing the barrier between websites and notifications for iOS users. This should make the API more popular, and while I hope it’s good, it could end up very bad.
What’s Web Push?
For the untechnical among us, since you may not know: On iOS, Push Notifications as a feature have been limited to the kind of apps you would download from the App Store since their inception.
Android doesn’t have this limitation, instead the system opts to allow apps and websites to send notifications directly to your devices.
The removal of that Safari limitation has been pined for by developers for ages.
The Ever-Increasing Value of Attention
With the arrival of iOS 16, the iPhones and iPads of the world will Meet Web Push, changing the metaphorical app game forever.
Attention is hard to come by these days, and I think it’s the second-most valuable thing to collect right next to true liquid gold: mass personal user data.
With everyone having such limited time and funds to split among the contenders in this golden age of entertainment, it only makes sense that greater and more elaborate means must be devised by companies to get their slice over the ever-saturating markets of gaming, movies+tv, the cacophony of social media apps, and everything that exists in the nondigital reality.
Thus came the new advent of advanced advertising and engagement companies. And they like the loud, repetitive sort of attention-grabbing: The kind that reaches you via your devices, chips at bits of your time, bases their engagement models on personal data, and makes you feel anything, even if that feeling is annoyance.
At this point, advertising has become a war on our silly little shrinking attention spans, and there’s an entire market with psychology and tech experts dedicated to winning this war. I personally think it’s all anti-user, but that’s just me.
My pet theory is that Discord withstood the massive controversy they faced from brightening their iconic brand color to capture more attention on home screens, in competition with already brightly-colored social apps like Twitter, Reddit, and Snapchat.
My theory is further proven by Instagram doing the exact same thing a year later.
The Grand Bubble of Piercing Noise
Overall, I fear a future where Push Notifications turn into another outlet for the cacophony of everything trying to get our attention. Everything has become so darn noisy that it sucks the joy out of things.
There’s never truly a “peak noise” either, just advances in ways of making the noise noisier. Optimization, Dark Patterns, and abusing human psychology means there will never be a real end, not `till they’re in our dreams.
I’ve been embracing hyper management of my email accounts recently, in my attempt at making the native Apple Mail client more pleasant to use.
What’s shocked me is how much raw effort it takes to do so: receiving a notification of some fresh spam entering my inbox, opening the spam, and then going through whatever unsubscribe process they have, cursing it all in my head, then getting back on track with whatever I was doing before. It’s a tedious pattern, and I have been making good headway. But really, was email supposed to be like this?
Fun fact: I recently signed up for a Chess.com account, and it took me twenty-nine clicks to unsubscribe from all notifications across email, web, and mobile.
The Next Bastion
The counterargument I keep asking myself is:
“If Web Push could be so annoying, why is everything going perfectly fine in Android Land??
I think the answer to that is Android having better notification controls, and I hope that iOS will improve in this sector by the time the API becomes fully functional (next year.)
But a secondary answer could be this: it’s not absolutely ubiquitous. To take the time and cost implementing a Web Push server just to be unable to reach a minority of people in the world using a specific brand of devices doesn’t seem entirely cost-effective.
Once that gate is opened, though, I fear the prompts for notification permissions will be the first thing one sees when accessing many sites, and it shall become as ubiquitous as prompts asking for your email for a newsletter or something. Why does everything have a newsletter!?
My Guilt + WP Will Probably Be Good!
I feel that as a web developer I’m not ”allowed” to have reservations about this. By all means, I’m excited that the line between web app and regular-schmegular app is further blurring. I’m not intending to spread FUD. I hope everything works out.
The good-natured possibilities are endless, and notifications shouldn’t be limited entirely to installed apps. They’re a substantial and valuable way to get attention for important events and critical information to users. But if the email advertising/psychological manipulation industry is anything to go off of, they will extend into something much more annoying, no matter how much notification settings are improved.
When I look up “Web Push Good” I get advertisement+engagement companies reinforcing that belief. And when I look up “Web Push Bad” I get advertisement+engagement companies telling me I’m wrong. I just don’t know if this is an entirely user-centric thing.
Also, a part of me remembers when I used to read my Notification Center and not get some twinges of annoyance. I miss that, and really don’t want things to worsen any further.
Side Note - Push Notification Spam Sites
My parents are Android People, and from I can understand, their primary phone use is on Facebook and WhatsApp.
Every couple of months I have to go through their phones and remove a bunch of websites that have been clogging their notification centers with genuine spam links, sorta like this:
It’s an epidemic on both Google Chrome and Samsung Internet, and the small bits of energy I have to waste going through the flow to remove all the domains simply can’t be ignored. I hate that this could become more widespread.
The Next Next Bastion
A subpoint I couldn’t find myself fitting anywhere else is this: In the worst-case scenario where Push Notifications are exhausted as an engagement channel, what’s next for the cacophony of noise? The Lock Screen? Imagine engaging your customers directly through their brains!
Slowdown
In the spirit of not contributing to The Grand Bubble of Piercing Noise, I’m slowing down my post schedule, as I’ve unwittingly turned blogging into a daily streak when it wasn’t meant to be one.
I’ve stretched myself a bit, picking an “interesting enough” topic and then writing a post long enough to justify the interestingness of it. The trade-off’s been making more projects, as well as my poor neglected technical section, and that’s being entirely unfair to it.
So, yeah. I’m doing this more as an every 4-5 days sort of thing. Probably horrendous for my analytics, but sacrificing principles for analytics is the basis of the entire concept I just ranted about.
RSS
I’m working on adopting an RSS feed, which has seemingly had a sort of resurgence after the whole debacle of the Twitter “buyout,” if you could call it that anymore. The Twitter -> Blog with RSS pilgrimage was a spectacle I saw occur for days, and while I haven’t personally found myself needing an RSS reader to keep up with the people I interface with, I can appreciate the tech and the people that use it.