My Phone’s Notifications Have Become Impossible to Manage
Between spam, Do Not Disturb, and confusing permissions, I have no idea when I’m missing something important.
When I got my first Android phone in 2008, I remember being stunned by the notification shade. It was a brilliant feature that seemed so obvious, yet most platforms still hadn’t adopted it: a single place to get every kind of notification you’d need. Get a new email? Notification. Text message? Notification. Someone on Twitter called you a moron? It’s right there in the notification shade!
Finally, there was a single funnel that everything important could be run through and either addressed or dismissed with ease. No more manually refreshing a dozen apps to find everything I needed to know in a given day. This would be the single most powerful productivity tool I’d ever use.
I was a naive moron.
Today, my phone’s notification system is a hellscape, which is cruelly ironic since I’ve never had more control over notifications. When Android’s notification system first came on the scene, you could pretty much either clear the whole lot of notifications out, or interact with them one-by-one. iOS was even worse, every notification interrupting whatever you were doing and, if you dismissed it, it…
