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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

And the worst part is that Apple could fix this in a heartbeat. Uber is straightforwardly in violation of App Store policies about "no advertising in push notifications", but a) they're too big to fail and b) Apple advertises via push notifications all the fucking time, so they have no leg to stand on here.

It's infuriating that the one thing the App Store monopoly could be useful for isn't even actually used in practice (if you're big enough, ofc, you and me get to eat shit if we try to evade App Store policy).

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Instagram is the worst offender, I only want to receive message notifications, but I got notifications about inane random stuff I've tried to disable but it won't work. I ended up having to disable notifications altogether.

Instagram run their notifications via an auction mechanism (which I suppose makes sense for an advertising company that likely built a lot of RTB systems).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04835

Instagram drove me so insane with that that I spent a while searching through the app to figure out how to disable it. There's a way to do it, and for a while it worked; I only got notifications about things like direct messages and posts from a few people I specifically told it to send notifications for, but I never got the "recommended" posts.

Then I got a replacement iPhone and reinstalled Instagram.app, and it defaulted to "show you notifications for everything we think you might be interested in" again, and I was too lazy to spend all that time relearning how to disable those notifications. I disabled the notifications entirely and now I open the app once a week or so to check in.

I had to do the same thing with Facebook years ago. Now I open it once a month to see who from high school got married in the last month and click the little "heart" icon and scroll until I get bored (~2 minutes). Can't trust Zuck with notifications.

> Now I open it once a month

So do I. Login on the web incognito.

I believe the App Store policy is you have to have a setting to disable ads. And Uber actually has it (though it has 8 different channels or so, apparently "Uber teen accounts" marketing was added recently).

I used the setting and am not getting Uber ads (only Uber ride notifications).

Currently my biggest problem isn't ads, it's all the apps now will find ANY excuse to send you a notification in order to keep their "Daily Active User" count high.

You turn off more and more categories and they'll still find a reason.

Presumably enforcing this would trigger an immediate legal response where Uber claims Apple is using their monopolistic control over the App Store.

I would love if Apple enforced that rule, but they certainly don't

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