One of the biggest advantages native apps have had over websites is the ability to send notifications.
This difference has disadvantaged individuals and companies that find themselves needing to invest in both having a website and a mobile app, and discouraged investment into good web experiences. As websites can finally provide experiences and leverage notifications as well as apps have been able to, I think we’ll see the quality of the web improve considerably.
I think the more likely outcome of this is a bunch more grandmas with 12 ads on their lockscreen at all times because users are so conditioned to click "accept" for every prompt they see just to get it out of the way
Web push notifications have basically only been used to make shitty experiences. Random websites sending you ads, every news site you just happened to click to read one article trying to trick you into letting them send notifications for new articles they publish, etc.
Apple has been refining the iOS notification experience to prevent this from being a problem for apps and I’m sure this will apply to websites too.
For example, putting notifications in the scheduled summary or asking users if they want to turn off notifications from an app they haven’t engaged with recently.
On the other hand, why should I have to download an app in order to know when I get outbid on eBay or a notification when a package is delivered. Like any messaging channel, not every business is going to use it in a smart way overnight. But I’m confident Apple will put the right guard rails around it, and it will be a welcome replacement to email. Unlike email, web push is privacy friendly, and has standard opt-in and opt-out methods.
Tangential: I’m not satisfied with the existing control of notifications in iOS. I want to allow ebay to notify me when my shipment gets updated but shut up when it wants to advertise. Not possible in the current setup. I have disabled notifications of many apps whose notifications include useful information but also too much garbage.
It’s a bit ambiguous, but the Apple App Store guidelines seem to require you to be able to opt-out from marketing push notifications, while still keeping other notifications.
From guideline 4.5.4: “Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. (..)” [0]
The developer/user experience guidelines also recommend to have a clear screen to opt-in and out of different types of notifications, and never to abuse privileges (e.g. send marketing notifications with a “time critical” flag to break through focus mode etc.).
I really hated Uber Eats when I thought they were abusing their notification privileges to send spam. But I recently found out that they do allow you to opt out of marketing notifications while still allowing order-related notifications (although they really are pushing it (pun intended) by sending at least two post-delivery notifications asking for tips and ratings, which could easily wait until I actually open the app again or at least be limited to just one delivery confirmation notification). Not sure if they are asking for clear opt-ins for new customers (they probably assumed opt-in based on some general consent I gave before this Apple policy came into effect).
App Store guidelines are only enforced when it's convenient for Apple. This clause has been routinely ignored and even Apple themselves broke it several times. There's no official way to report violations either.
> I want to allow ebay to notify me when my shipment gets updated but shut up when it wants to advertise.
Developers are supposed to clearly separate notifications into groups that users can turn off individually, but right now it's not something that gets apps rejected from the app store review process[0].
Also, iOS 16 introduces managing shipping in Wallet[1], however apps need to use an API to 'ship' their tracking numbers to the Wallet app; wish this included the ability to manually add tracking numbers and/or scan mail from the built-in Mail app for tracking links.
> why should I have to download an app in order to know when I get outbid on eBay or a notification when a package is delivered
What’s wrong with prioritized emails? Of course they prefer to send you push notifications via app because it is an additional (and someway less filtered) channel.
Once also push notifications will get the same spam inbox filtering system (which iOS already has) then we will all scream for the next channel to be filled of spam (retina displayed popups?)
A push is potentially a better experience. You could long press the push notification and the app could increase its bid by 10%. You can't do things like that through email.
To your point, maybe we should innovate on email and add these capabilities to email, instead of building apple/android specific push solutions. I'd love to see that, but we don't live in that world.
It got to the point for a while there where it was like having pop-up ads all over again, except this time the ads were all for the site I was currently reading. This will be abused if it's not opt-in by default (as in I need to specifically enable the feature in the browser before it starts asking me if I want these notifications).
It is not useless for me. I disabled it in Chrome as well, but I can enable it for selected websites. I'm using lots of messengers (discord, telegram, whatsapp, skype) from the browser and notifications are what makes it possible.
It's not so much a chicken-and-egg situation (plenty of sites and browsers already support this), the problem is the sheer number of bad eggs. When the feature rolled out in Firefox, I noticed almost every site I visited wanted to send me push notifications. Rather than reject them one by one, I disabled the feature entirely within Firefox.
Given that it’s opt in (likely by adding the website to your Home Screen I imagine if the Safari storage expiration is any indication) - how’s this any different than apps spamming you?
Is it going to require you to add the site to your home screen, or is it gonna be like Chrome where you just get an "allow/block" button while browsing around, which all casual users will hit "allow" on because they're trying to get to the content?
A website spamming you is very different from an app spamming you. Going to the app store and installing an app takes much more buy-in from a user than just clicking a link. If someone shares a news article from a random site I've never seen before, I might be willing to click it. If that same person told me to install an app to read an article, it's not happening in the first place. I've got a very short list of curated apps I installed on my device. The web is mostly garbage though and most of it shouldn't be sending notifications.
Given that notifications are not alerts and generally notifications are useful in the context of not being on the page, I’m confident it will require the site to be manually added to the Home Screen. I’d be surprised if it works any other way since safari currently freezes all safari pages other than the active one.
Even if that’s not the case though, still dont see how it’s different than app notifications.
I'm glad some people are happy about this. I'm just hoping Apple includes an option to automatically opt out of all web notification requests. The fact that every website asks you to accept notifications has rendered the feature useless, since I feel compelled to disable it entirely at the browser level to block those obnoxious pop-up.
I think it is a red herring to see the lack of push notification support on web as some kind of “big” handicap vs native. There are so many advantages that native brings, push notifications is probably in a second tier list (10th+).
One of the biggest advantages native apps have had over websites is the ability to send notifications.
This difference has disadvantaged individuals and companies that find themselves needing to invest in both having a website and a mobile app, and discouraged investment into good web experiences. As websites can finally provide experiences and leverage notifications as well as apps have been able to, I think we’ll see the quality of the web improve considerably.