On the iPhone I get tons of app notifications that are a mystery.

They don’t have any text or icon to indicate why, and when I click and it opens the app there isn’t anything to see. It’s just a regular opening of the app. Maybe a few hours later I’ll realize I got an email at that time with some marketing message.

There are some online services that let you elect to distinguish between marketing notifications and service delivery notifications. But that’s usually buried someplace, and it’s usually not there at all.

With all the tight rule enforcement that Apple does with abs in the store, I don’t understand why they don’t lock this down. It should be prohibited to get a notification on the lock screen, and then you go to the app and there’s no clear statement of why the notification came. And when that happens, you should have a way with a long hold or a slide or something to say that you never want to get this type of notification again and electing to do that will not interfere with essential notifications that are time sensitive to service and progress.

As it stands, it kind of ruins the whole point of notifications. I either turn them off and then I miss things when I need them, or I leave it on and I get bothered by DoorDash every day when it thinks it’s lunchtime or I get random pings from the JetBlue app because perhaps they have some sale and I’m alarmed thinking I forgot to cancel a booking.

This single issue makes the whole phone experience shit.

When you install an app, it should default to essential notifications only. The volume of notifications should be monitored by Apple centrally or on my phone individually, and when things seem to be going wrong, I should be prompted to fix it. Notifications are consistently ignored, or I click on them, but spend, less than 10 seconds in the app, it should be a signal that something is wrong and there should be some kind of fix or some kind of punishment of the developer.