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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 was gone forever.
That seems like an easy concept to improve on, but the sheer number of features, controls, and options have created a labyrinth of permissions that make it impossible to know for sure whether I’m getting something important, all while my notification feed fills up with an ever-increasing amount of junk.
One of the key contributors to this chaos is, paradoxically, Do Not Disturb. This feature seems like a no-brainer: Tell your phone that between X and Y hours, no notifications should get through, except for text messages or calls from certain contacts.
The problem is that using a “contact” is a somewhat outdated model of identifying a person. If someone important sends me a text message, I can tell DND to let those messages through. However, if they DM me on, say, Slack or Discord, their message will be blocked unless I allow the entire app to send direct messages (and more on why that’s…
