Push notifications were once useful. They alerted you to urgent messages, updates, or real-time actions inside your apps. Today, they’re little more than delivery systems for unsolicited ads. From e-commerce platforms to food delivery services, apps now use notifications to push sales, discounts, and irrelevant updates you never asked for.
This shift turns a useful feature into a noisy distraction. Instead of helping you stay informed, notifications are now constant interruptions cluttered with content you didn’t opt in to receive. Most apps don’t offer meaningful control. Even when you disable “marketing notifications,” promotional alerts often keep coming. In many cases, the only real fix is disabling all notifications, which defeats their original purpose.
Apple’s Role and the Decline of Notification Quality
Apple played a key role in this problem. In 2020, it relaxed its rules on advertising in push notifications. The company itself now promotes its services through them. Users report receiving alerts from Apple TV+ about shows they’ve never watched or searched for. That set the tone for app developers, who now treat your lock screen like a billboard.
Time-sensitive notification APIs were introduced to separate meaningful alerts from spam, but developers rarely use them. Why would they? Opting in means giving up prime space for ads. iOS doesn’t require notification categories the way Android does, which means users can’t turn off promotional messages without turning off everything.
Users Frustrated, Options Limited
On Reddit, users across iOS forums are frustrated. A user described getting bombarded by the AliExpress app with promotions, despite never signing up for such alerts. Another said they downloaded the Domino’s app for delivery tracking, only to be hit with weekly ads. A different user noted that Uber Eats doesn’t separate driver messages from promotional ones, leaving no middle ground between full access and total silence.
Android users highlight a better system. On that platform, developers must separate promotional, transactional, and service-related notifications into channels. You can silence the ads while keeping delivery alerts or account updates.
Notifications were designed to inform. Instead, they’ve become another tool to sell. Unless platforms enforce stricter controls or let users fine-tune preferences, the problem will only grow.