iOS Notifications in 2018

Heavyweight
2 min readJun 5, 2018

Ever since Android got grouped notifications in the early palaeolithic, iOS users have begged and pleaded with Apple for equal notification rights. In 2016 we wrote a little Medium article about how Apple was still missing the mark with Notification Center.

We all have that special friend, colleague or loved one who just. Can’t. Wait. To. Send. Their. Messages. Before. Finishing. Them! For some of us, these repeated messages lead to a perpetual stream of notifications that drive you mad.

We wrote about rapid-fire messages and notification gridlock and apparently we weren’t the only ones ready for a different approach. The article got lots of traction in the design community and sparked the age-old debate; why was iOS Notification Center still so primitive in 2016?

Then, cars started driving themselves, rockets grew little feet and started landing and a few bottles of water were flipped right-side up. Two years passed…

But finally, this week Apple announced its plans to incorporate grouped notifications into iOS 12 at its annual developer conference. **And the crowd goes wild…** It only took them a decade.

Photo by Marques Brownlee

Let me be clear. We love iOS. We often point to it as an example of exceptional UI design and we frequently use it as a source of inspiration for our own work. But it is time that Apple started moving a bit faster with these oft-requested features.

Let’s hope the volume HUD gets fixed before 2020!

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Heavyweight
Heavyweight

Written by Heavyweight

Independent venture design studio that builds AI systems to help humans. https://heavyweight.nl

Responses (3)

What are your thoughts?

We all have that special friend, colleague or loved one who just. Can’t. Wait. To. Send. Their. Messages. Before. Finishing. Them! For some of us, these repeated messages lead to a perp...

People need to think about their messages more before sending them. Texting ≠ talking. The fact they can’t stop spamming that blue button isn’t gone because there is a software update.

6

As much as I buy into your opinion post above, the uproar of the crowd was simply for the fact that, at least, after all these years, it’s here. After all these years of begging and pleading we’ve at least got what we always wanted. It definitely…

6

We all have that special friend, colleague or loved one who just. Can’t. Wait. To. Send. Their. Messages. Before. Finishing. Them! For some of us, these repeated messages lead to a perpetual stream of notifications that drive you mad.
That’s just…

1