On Notifications and E-mails

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Recently I noticed that with the iPhone 14 checking notifications is a challenge. You have to really want to see notifications for them to show up. In some cases I find that they are automatically bypassed by the current iOS.

Whilst this might seem problematic, most notifications, in 2025 are a waste of time. They are duplicates from Strava, Linkedin, Udemy and plenty of other sites. If these sites are sticky enough, then we will see the notifications on the site, while we’re sitting at a computer, so we don’t need them to appear in our phone notifications.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, if you check e-mails every so often, you find that almost all e-mails are the same notifications that were sent by the same apps to your phone. You’re getting duplicates, if we don’t count the notifications you get straight from the app.

Out of four hundred e-mails plenty will be from an active project on github, others will be from Strava, and yet more will be Linkedin Spam.

On mobile phones, and in e-mail it is easy to get to hundreds of notifications, if not per day, then definitely per week. That’s why phones are silent. If we got notifications for every junk message from apps, then we would annoy everyone around us, including ourselves.

And Finally

In my eyes a successful website or app is one that doesn’t require notifications or e-mails to get your attention. A good app or site is one that we visit more than once per day. It is one that requires no e-mails and notifications.

E-mails and notifications that replace RSS have little value. E-mails that encourage conversations are worthwhile.