What makes you turn off an app's notifications?
You try a new app and leave its notifications on. Soon the same channel is carrying:
Updates you need to act on
Routine progress reports
Reminders to come back
Muting everything takes one click. Keeping only the useful messages may mean digging through settings.
For an app builder, the hard choice is which messages deserve an interruption and which can wait until the next visit. Too much noise can get important alerts muted too.
Think of the last app you muted. What notification pushed you to do it?
Would fewer messages or a daily summary have changed your mind?
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the "come back" reminders are usually the first to get muted, they're about the app and not about anything you need to do. a daily summary only works if it says what actually changed, did people in your tests open it more than the single pushes?
I don't have a push-versus-digest comparison to share. I'd measure whether people act on the important update, rather than opens alone. A digest that gets opened but buries a payment issue would still be a poor result.
@al_kub acting on the update instead of just opening it is a better yardstick, yeah. would you treat a billing failure and a plain deadline reminder the same way?
I'd rank them by the consequence of waiting. A payment failure with a week to fix it can be less urgent than a deadline in an hour. For either, measure whether the issue was resolved in time and stop reminders once it is.
@al_kub ranking by what waiting costs makes sense, and stopping once it's fixed is the bit most apps skip. would the deadline itself show in the notification text?
From the sender's side: we audited our own emails this month and found 77 customers had received six or more in 30 days, and our two most active ones got 11 or 12. None of them was spam on its own. Each scenario had its own budget, and nobody was counting the total. One alert type was even skipping the unsubscribe setting.
What we changed: one shared cap across everything (6 per 30 days), at least 48 hours between any two emails, and a priority order. Messages about money, like a payment or a bonus, are never blocked by the cap; "come back" style reminders are the first to wait. To Neeraj's point, those reminders were exactly the ones we cut first.
I'd distinguish a failed payment from a promotional bonus. Both involve money, but only one needs an urgent interruption. Otherwise the exception could let marketing emails bypass the shared cap.
I usually mute notifications that are just the app trying to get my attention. But if it’s a sale, a reply, or a payment issue, I want to know. I don’t need a reminder that I haven’t opened the app in a week!!