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Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

The big omission for me was not addressing the notification system. Its never scaled well past the original intent of missed calls / voicemails. A common problem I encounter is a screen full of notifications and the need to unlock the phone to do something. Once I do that they vanish. A Notifications app would be a quick and dirty fix. Just let me go back to them instead of hunting through different applications to figure out what I missed.

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Especially surprising considering Android has a robust notification system. It's laughably simple on the iPhone.

Android's notification system is one of the things that really rocks about the platform. It's quick to scan, never gets in your way, and works seamlessly.

Absolutely. I never kept my iPhone apps up to date, because it was a pain to go into the app store and re-download them. The app store buy/download button had always been problematic for me, anyway - sometimes it would take six tries just to get it to register.

Now, I get a notification when there's an update, roll it down, click the notification and click the clear and accurate "download" button.

And then I get notified when it's finished. It's really quite nice. (the glowing trackball is fantastic, too: so many times I'd miss an SMS or a call on my phone and not realize it until minutes or hours later)

> Absolutely. I never kept my iPhone apps up to date, because it was a pain to go into the app store and re-download them. The app store buy/download button had always been problematic for me, anyway - sometimes it would take six tries just to get it to register.

The store should let you update all apps at once--when you open the app it goes and checks if there are updates available and if so you'll see them in the bottom right. There's an option for update all.

I think the idea is that once you've unlocked the phone the app icons tell you what items need attention.

That's great if you have one screen of apps, but really pathetic when you have to swipe through 5-10 screens so you can see your AP news app has an update. Even worse when you have to then hunt for the update once you get in the app (AP again, or Facebook).

Not to mention, you can't ignore a notification so you can look at it later... It's either view or dismiss.

They're only one rung above notepad.exe's "Search reached end of document | Ok" dialog, but only because for most of them hitting Ok takes you to the source of the notification.

They're a disaster compared to Apple's desktop HCI guidelines that insist on verbed dialogs and disdain "Cancel | Ok"

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