On android, each app's notifications are categorized. For, say, Uber, I can enable the obvious useful notifications and can disable promotional notifications. Presumably Google penalizes ignoring or abusing this system.

Hahahahaha - sorry, the mere suggestion that Google cares enough about this to "penalize" anyone who ignores this system is actually really funny to me. No, of course they don't do any such thing. The system is entirely and completely optional, and developers have long ago realized that actually using it is to their own detriment, because users will just block the marketing notifications but leave the important ones, so they just bundle everything together. I have actually messaged several developers of some of the apps I use if they can fix this exact thing and the response has always been "sorry we don't have the technical ability to do this" which is obviously complete nonsense. But no, there isn't any penalty for not doing this from google.

Is it really that surprising to you that something Google has created works better than something Apple has created for a specific narrow problem?

These are all trillion dollar companies, your allegiance is wasted.

....my "allegiance" if you want to call it that is entirely to Google, so I don't understand your point? Did you somehow get from my point that I'm an iOS user???

>>that something Google has created works better

Does it? The system for categorizing notification does exist on android, but it's not enforced in any way by Google on the Play Store so most devs ignore it - do you take an issue with anything I said?

Huh. It really worked well for me so far. Interesting.

You're lucky. I found that even Google doesn't respect their own categories, and happily bucket useful information together with spam.

And for the bad applications you can use FilterBox (paid app), that allows you to regex them and automate them in different ways.

I tend to use "Focus Mode" turned on always in Android. Most apps are short lived (5 min after being opened manually), this reduces a lot of the spam. I automate extending this time using the same FilterBox to auto click the notification that the app will close in a minute, but only if the screen is turned on. So the app gets automatically disabled when I stop using the phone.

The only android app I've ever seen with real categories is MS Teams.

Of course changing any setting on Teams has catastrophic unpredictable effects on it... But at least they tried.

You can't, tho, because no major apps actually separate the promotional notifications.

> But more importantly, how does it differentiate between "Your delivery has arrived" and "this weekend, 10% off all deliveries paid with mastercard from chase banks"

IIUC it is up to the app developer to tag the notifications they generate as time sensitive (or not) for iOS

> how does it differentiate

Probably through a pinky promise from the developers to call the right APIs.

Another piece is that all “time sensitive” notifications come with a button underneath to not let that app send time sensitive notifications anymore

Probably. And then I would expect the app store review process to check.