I desperately wish iOS would improve notifications
iOS notifications need some love. One thing I noticed when using Android is I could manage all my communications through my notification panel. So when I swapped back iOS, it’s one of the biggest areas, to me, where I notice iOS is way being Androids system. But in a ton of areas it’s ahead. I love iOS and my iPhone and want so badly to see Apple give their notifications some attention. Here are my thoughts on iOS notifications.
Not intuitive: Every action you can take on a notification besides swiping away or tapping it to open it (which are the only two actions most iPhone users use because its really hard to think to do anything else with them) is not obvious or presented in a way that you’ll ever remember to use (unless you train your brain daily to remember it). iOS notifications do have actions behind them, but you have to remember to long press the notification. But what you find behind that long press is different for every type of notification. If you long press on messages you’ll get defaulted to a quick reply view. But if you long press a missed call notification, you’ll get presented with a menu asking if you want to “Call Back” or “Message” the person who called you. So for the end user over time, it’s hard to even remember what tools are behind the long press. Which leads them to either ignoring the notifications all together or just opening the app and handling the communication from there….which is a failure on the notifications part. The goal should be to let me handle my communications without going into every single app.
Letting the user know they have notifications when they aren’t on the lock screen / notification center: Outside of the initial banner that pops up for a couple of seconds (which is nice when you are using the phone), the only way Apple lets the user know they have notifications that haven’t been addressed is through badges. Badges should have been outlawed by iOS 7 at the latest. The fact they are still around is baffling to me. If the badges were tied to the notification in the notification center, I’d be more forgiving, but they aren’t. They are two separate things and are controlled by two separate events…which means they are broken and it’s clear Apple has 0 interest in fixing them. If I were to quick reply to a message notification from several of my apps in the notification center and those notifications as a result got removed from the notification center, if I went back to my home screens, I’d still see badges for those notifications lighting up those app icons. If I swipe away a notification from the notification center, it’s still lighting up those app icons with numbered badges even though I took action on that notification. The only way to make them go away is to open the app, to that part of the app where the notification is from and manually read that notification in the app for the badge to go away. BROKEN!!! That’s some of the shittiest UI / UX I could imagine on a modern OS. I’m really disappointed that Apple hasn’t at least cleaned that shit up yet.
If Apple were to just have the available actions on a notification from the notification center (I’d even accept letting the user tap on the notification and get presented with them instead of just taking the user to the app), that’d improve #1 greatly. Seems like the simplest thing they could possible do. In terms of the badges…get rid of them. If you have pending notifications in you notification center, just show a notification count in your dynamic island and if you long press on it, it’ll show you the top priority icons of apps sitting in your notification center.
Those two things would fix notifications on iOS and make it infinitely more useful.
What are your thoughts? Do any of you have a discipline with iOS notifications where you find them extremely useful and I’m missing the plot? Part of this is to share my thoughts in hopes of knowing if anyone agrees or to point out what I’m missing that makes iOS notifications great. Maybe there’s a setting somewhere that addresses these things and I’m not aware.