A Call for Reason Regarding Mobile Notifications

I remember not so long ago when I bought the original iPhone (yes, I’m one of those people), and I had a panic attack about emails being pushed to my device. You see, back in 2007, Gmail didn’t have default push notifications for mobile devices. That means, in essence, emails wouldn’t show up on your phone as soon as they were sent. Your phone had to … GULP … fetch emails from the server. This, at least at the time, lead to battery drain and yet another grievance to add to a list of things that ended up annoying iPhone 1 users after the shine wore off.

Eventually the iPhone got support for Exchange protocols, and Google cobbled together a sync client to help people get push email on their iPhones. MMS came a little later. All of these changes occurred because it became clear very quickly that people wanted instant communication. They wanted their messages and they wanted them yesterday. I was certainly one of those people. As I transitioned from my iPhone to my BlackBerry Bold (still the best phone I ever had and I will fight anyone who doesn’t think it was great for 2009), I was given the glorious world of BlackBerry Messenger. It was instant messaging over your data connection, so that you didn’t need to use up your text messages. REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE WERE CONCERNED ABOUT AMOUNTS OF TEXT MESSAGES?! That’s how hungry for communication we were. We wanted our phones to buzz early and buzz often.

Now, I often keep my phone on silent and leave it sitting somewhere. At times I’ll wear my Pebble watch, but in all honesty if I don’t get the notification on my laptop (email, Gchat, Twitter, Slack message), I don’t really care. My wife knows to Gchat me to talk during the day. My parents will call if there’s an emergency. My phone has turned into a holding cell for crap I don’t care about — Snapchat, Instagram, and a horde of other messages I just swipe-to-ignore on instinct.

The main offenders, for me, are sports apps. This has a lot to do with the fact that I’m a sports fan, but the behavior of these apps has started to get out of control.

I’ll admit I play DraftKings every now and again — but honestly, quite rarely. The developers of the DraftKings app have taken umbrage with this and have taken to berating me with offers to enter all kinds of contests. Just today, I got an alert asking me if I was ready for football season. Considering I never once played a game of daily fantasy football, this seemed like an odd question. I barely care about real football, I ain’t chomping at the bit to get going on daily fantasy.

I use MLB At Bat specifically for their Android home screen widget and the Gameday Audio function. The notifications have become so granular, that I stopped trying to set them all and turned the whole thing off. I use CBS Sports’ app exclusively now, and even it gives me the business sometimes. It does a good job of letting me know when a game starts or there’s a lead change or what the final score is. I like that part. I use the app to do the same for the hockey team I care about, the football team I kind of care about, and I’m all set. CBS Sports’ app isn’t perfect, but I feel it does the best job of letting me know the stuff I want to know. That is, unless no-hit bids or possible cycles are involved.

I kind of get no-hitters. I don’t particularly care about them all that much, but a lot of people do. That being said, I don’t need notifications if a pitcher has a no-hitter going after six innings. It’s certainly an accomplishment, but I’m not that interested. If the pitcher pitches for my favorite team — the team I have designated in the settings of the app — then sure, let me know. But at least one rando is going to have something going once a week. I don’t need to know if it’s happening. And I especially don’t need to know when it’s been broken up. There are very few no-hitters per year. How about you let me know if something’s going on after seven innings, and let me ASSUME that it will die somehow before the night is over. Let me know when it happens, not when it doesn’t.

And alerts about the cycle can suck on a tailpipe. The cycle is a random event. It’s no more important than a hitter going five for five with two doubles and a homer. I mean, yeah, technically it probably leads to a slightly higher wPA, but come on. And I’ll come out and say it; I think MLB’s app is really good. It does a lot of great things and has nice features and is a slick overall experience. But I basically neutered it after about the 100th “so and so is a triple short of the cycle” alerts. As of this writing, 148 players have been a triple short of the cycle this year. I subscribe to the “MLB News” notifications for notes about trades, managers getting fired, dudes blasting four homers in a game, and so forth. I don’t want alerts about an event that happens about one a night. Stay out my lock screen, MLB.

For a while, CBS and MLB were both blowing up my phone at a frenzied pace before I actually took 20 minutes to tweak the things. Imagine if I had ESPN or Yahoo! Sports apps on my phone.

I understand that by downloading these apps, I’m asking for it a little. But here’s my plea, makers of sports apps: let us opt in. Make us go into the notification settings of the app and enable things we want to see rather than disable the things we don’t. No one has ever said “I like this app a lot, but I wish it would bother me more.” We have enough stuff going on. We love sports, but not this much. If we did, we’d tell you.

We find ourselves constantly looking for digital shovels to free ourselves from all the alerts — all the reminders of things we have to do and things we will have to do soon and things we should have taken care of weeks ago. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I should just hide the dumb phone while I’m watching the game and enjoy the damn thing — only stare at one screen for a change. Perhaps I’m to blame. But sooner or later, I’m going to start cleaning house. That’s the kind of integrity kick (NSFW) I’m on.

(Header image via Nicolas Raymond)





David G. Temple is the Managing Editor of TechGraphs and a contributor to FanGraphs, NotGraphs and The Hardball Times. He hosts the award-eligible podcast Stealing Home. Dayn Perry once called him a "Bible Made of Lasers." Follow him on Twitter @davidgtemple.

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Bryan Cole
8 years ago

“Old Man Yells At Cloud-Based Service”

Josh W
8 years ago

I turn ’em all off. I don’t need to know that I missed something. If I cared, I wouldn’t have missed it.

Jason E
8 years ago

Amen brother

it's not that hard
8 years ago

Just go into the app settings and turn off what notifications you don’t want . I don’t get how it’s that hard. People will find a way to complain about anything.

Jon Sullivan
8 years ago

Disabling push notifications has been the best smartphone-related decision I have ever made.

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8 years ago

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