Not gonna gatekeep posts, but this one seems more like a bug than asshole design IMO. Though "pay attention to me!"-style notifications existing for the app at all is assholey, so it's probably a bug in their asshole design.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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AssholeDesign
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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.
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You can “Report a Problem” from the App Store page (USA only, sorry) and select “Report a quality issue” in the form.
I think technically marketing-only notifications are still frowned upon according to App Store guidelines. But the App Store reviewers are temperamental batshit insane specious fuckwits so
Why wouldn’t you uninstall it?
You would but this definitely fits the criteria for asshole design.
By tolerating it you are perpetuating it.
In Android when you long press on the notification you can also disable them.
In case you need/want to use the app but not see the notifications
And newer versions of Android have notification categories for each app.
So if the developer does their homework I can turn off particular notification types and let others through, and that way you can -gasp!- actually have a messaging app that only notifies you of actual messages, instead of constantly begging for your attention for a bunch of superfluous crap.
And if I go to the notification settings for that app and it doesn't have a category I can easily drop, it either gets completely silenced, or it gets uninstalled.
So if the developer does their homework I can turn off particular notification types and let others through
Experience shows that most apps, especially the ones where you would want to disable a subset of their notifications, do not support that.
So in most cases I will just disable them completely and if I feel generous I will remind them about this feature via a play store review.
I think it's becoming a play store requirement for apps to use various "notification channels" or whatever it's called, so hopefully the all or nothing behaviour will disappear in time.
Orrrr as you say apps get totally silenced / uninstalled, I don't have the patience for that kind of stuff anymore.
iOS has this too, including silencing/blocking indefinitely, just for 24 hours, or just 1 hour.
But the problem is that these asshole apps often bank on the fact that you need notifications for some things in their app and don’t want to disable all because you’ll miss those.
See apps like OfferUp that don’t let you turn off all the spam crap they push because it’ll make you miss shipping notifications or messages about your orders.