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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   3472 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Phone apps are getting really aggressive lately about constantly sending useless notifications. They make it extremely difficult to figure out how to turn them off if they even let you. Threads is especially bad about this. Is there a guide somewhere on how to disable notifications?

The more general problem I've been having lately is that settings menus are now totally unintuitive. I used to be able to find something by just looking through the menu, but now, no matter what aim looking for, I almost always have to Google it, and half the time the instructions will be wrong because the app developers seem to reorganize their menus at least once a year.

Why do they do this? I get far more utility out of the layout of an app staying the same than I do out of any design changes, usually.

I'm confused; notification settings aren't controlled within the app on Android, they're on the app info settings page which is identical for every app and allows you to disable types of notifications or all notifications for an app. Of course, the app might have overly coarse categories or lie about its notification categories, so you might have to disable more notifications than you intended, I guess.

This is not correct. Where are you getting your information?

That is correct. I'm not sure why you are saying it isn't. For at least a couple of Android versions, you can control notifications on a system level. Go into the system settings for the app (where you would go to control the permissions it has, or to force stop it), and one of the options will be for "Notifications". You will get a screen that looks like the attached image, and you can turn notifications off wholesale or by category.

As @token_progressive says, it's not perfect because it's up to the app to accurately categorize the notifications it can send. But this functionality does exist at the OS level.

/images/17139056367605028.webp

I'm saying it isn't because you can control notifications within apps on Android. For example, on Instagram, I can click my face on the bottom left, then the three lines at the top left, and then notifications. Every app has something like this.

In Instagram's case, controlling notifications through the OS doesn't work because they're labelled too vaguely. They don't even mention Threads.

It does "work" although it might not be at the granularity you want it to be as SF said.

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