When it comes to push notifications on iOS, you’re in one of two camps: either you like being notified about every little thing that happens on the web and enjoy apps bothering you to come and rescue your candy, or you treat your push notifications as sacred and only have then enabled for stuff you actually want to be notified. Tsunami warnings being one of them, test or no test.
https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/539589577116508160
A recent push notification from Apple promoting its Product(RED) campaign on the Apple Online Store led to a veritable tweetstorm from Apple technorati, including Marco Arment who vehemently opposed the idea, who (rightly) called it out for being promotional and in violation of the App Store developer guidelines.
People were then divided: while Arment likened it to having someone walking into your house and start telling you about their charity, and then saying it was below Apple to promote itself like that, others saw it as a simple awareness-raising for a good cause, brushing it off with “no harm done”. Arment’s response was to say that it was not about whether it was OK to promote a good cause or not (that’s obviously OK, apparently), but about crossing the boundary — like putting a free U2 album in everyone’s iTunes library uninvited.
So, I’m asking you guys: do you treat your push notifications as sacred? Do you only allow certain apps to notify you? Or are you all for being interrupted by every little thing, safe in the knowledge that you have the self-control to not look at your phone until you’re done with the task at hand?