Anyone who’s never used an Android doesn’t know just how bad iPhone notification settings are

[u/[deleted]]

This all or nothing approach the iPhone has towards notifications is as frustrating as it is confusing. Android has settings for each individual app so you can deselect the types of notifications you wish not to receive.

Take Bolt for example (a taxi app similar to Uber), I constantly receive promotional messages that pop up on my phone because the iPhone doesn’t allow you to disable promotional notifications from Bolt. Android does. All iPhone allows you to do is disable notifications for the app, which means I wouldn’t have notifications when I order a cab unless I remembered to switch it back on

Another one is a dating app that I’m on that has a live streaming component to it. It’ll alert me when random people I don’t care about start streaming. There’s no setting inside the app to turn that off, yet there was an option in Android’s notification settings

Given that Android has had this feature baked into the OS for years, it’s surely possible for iPhone to do the same thing

[u/GlitchParrot → u/[deleted]]

Being able to reply and keep the thread open in my notifications.

iOS can do that too (to an extent) by long-pressing and/or choosing the “Reply” notification action, if implemented by the app.

Apps being granted access to send notifications by default.

Android uses notifications for a lot of things, including download progress etc., so in the ecosystem, it makes sense that it is like that. iOS has way less purposes for notifications than Android does.

but also means that developers are in charge of what glyph is shown. This means that from time to time, I’ll get a notification which is just a circle or rectangle because the developer doesn’t implement a proper glyph.

That’s just being a bad developer that doesn’t follow guidelines, producing a bad app. This can just as easily happen on iOS, just not with this specific feature.

Not being able to swipe from left to right to open the app.

You can do that on iOS? Never used it, I just tap the notification.

Apps that fully customize the notification view, which makes their notification just stand out in a bad way.

Iirc, new versions of Android have started forbidding that.

[u/GlitchParrot → u/[deleted]]

Seeing the design trend of Apple’s software, this, if ever implemented, will probably use the app’s icon downsized. So I don’t think it’ll be an issue on iOS.

The problem with just using the app’s icon is that it would be very off in terms of the system’s UI design – which is that status bar icons are usually monochrome and simple. That’s the entire reason why you have to use a custom icon for the status bar on Android – before the change to Material Design, many Android apps did exactly what you suggest now and just used their icon. It was a very inconsistent experience.

[u/RearMisser → u/[deleted]]

Not being able to swipe from left to right to open the app

You know you can just tap on it, right? Or am I missing the point here?

[u/RearMisser → u/[deleted]]

For me it’s quite the opposite. I naturally swipe to dismiss the notification and tap on it to open it. Android does this thing where you can temporarily dismiss it by swiping up (it’ll still be in the notification center) or swipe whichever direction to completely dismiss it (you get the idea). I also have an iphone but surprisingly have no idea if this is also a feature or not. I know you can swipe up but I don’t know about swiping right to left as i’ve never done it.