My second proposal — and this is a wild one — is that promotional notifications should just not be allowed. Or you can opt in to them if you desperately want to hear from the Starbucks app every single day, but you should have to go out of your way to do that and should not be the default behavior when you choose “allow notifications.” Just an idea!
The author calls out the Starbucks app here, but doesn’t mention how blatantly dark-patterned its notifications really are. Android allows apps to set up multiple notification channels, so you can selectively prioritize (or, more often, mute or block) notifications based on their content. Starbucks uses this feature… to create a single channel called “Promotions & order status”. You wanted to know when your order’s ready? Fuck you and your concentration, get double stars today!
I appreciate the notification controls Android gives me, and I use them aggressively. If an app pushes a notification that doesn’t actually require my attention, I block that channel, and if it does it again, I block notifications for the whole app. I agree with the author, though: I shouldn’t need to do that.
The use of a single channel should be against the rules for commerce apps.
They’d probably get around that by having a ‘Promotions and Order status’ channel and a random / unused one like an ‘App update available’ channel. Promotional notifications should just really be banned.
It should be enough for the Play Store to require any promotional notifications to go to an exclusively promotional channel for users to manage as they please.
Next stage, would be a “report notification” option, so Google could suspend the app for spamming. That would curb the dark pattern behavior quite quickly.
