What Apple and Google are doing to your push notifications | Jacques Corby-Tuech

Contents

Push as a battery problem

Fifteen years of platform intervention

What email did first

The on-device editor

What users actually do with notifications

What the marketer can see

Writing for the model in the pipe

Shifting weight to owned surfaces

What this becomes

What to do about it

I wrote recently about what Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple are doing to your email: how four providers stopped being transport layers and turned into active intermediaries between brands and their customers, parsing, ranking, summarising, and increasingly answering on the recipient's behalf.

The same thing is happening to push, with two companies in control instead of four. Apple and Google run the only two pipes that matter, and every notification you have ever sent has passed through one of them. Over the last five years the on-device model that now sits between delivery and your lock screen began summarising, reordering and, on some surfaces, rewriting it.

Notification summaries on Android.

Push as a battery problem

Push begins as a battery problem. In June 2009 Scott Forstall stood at WWDC and made the case that an iPhone could not afford to let every installed application maintain its own background poll against a remote server. The proposal, delayed from its initial September 2008 announcement after Apple decided to restructure the underlying infrastructure for scale, was the Apple Push Notification Service, a single persistent TLS connection from each device to Apple, over which any registered third party could deliver alerts.1 APNs shipped with iPhone OS 3 on 17 June 2009. Google followed in 2010 with Cloud to Device Messaging, then Google Cloud Messaging in 2012, then Firebase Cloud Messaging in 2016.2

The channel was intermediated from the start. Every notification you send to an iPhone passes through Apple's servers; every one to an Android phone passes through Google's. The platforms have always been able to throttle, drop, log, deprioritise or refuse. For most of the channel's history they did very little of it visibly. The architecture was permissive of intervention; they simply chose not to intervene much. That restraint is what ended.

Fifteen years of platform intervention

The early consumer push era between 2009 and 2017 was comparatively quiet. APNs and the various Google services delivered to whichever apps the user had installed, with limited platform-level filtering and minimal user controls beyond a single per-app on or off toggle.

Android's first significant on-device intervention was notification channels in Android 8 Oreo, August 2017.3 Before Android 8, individual notifications carried a priority level decided by the sender. After Android 8, that lever passed to the developer at the channel level and then to the user at the channel level. The developer declared a small number of channels per app (downloads, messages, promotions, and so on), each with an importance value from IMPORTANCE_NONE to IMPORTANCE_HIGH; the user could then independently mute, demote, badge-disable or fully block any channel without affecting the others.3 Once a channel's importance was set by the developer it could not be raised later. Any app targeting Android 8 had to declare channels or notifications would simply not display.

Apple introduced its own version in iOS 15 in September 2021 under different language. Focus, Scheduled Summary, and a new four-level interruption taxonomy (passive, active, time-sensitive, critical) restructured how iOS treated each push.4 Time-sensitive was the only level you could meaningfully address, and Apple was explicit, then and now, that you should not use it for marketing.4 Android made permission itself the lever in August 2022, when Android 13 turned POST_NOTIFICATIONS into a runtime permission, requiring an explicit user grant rather than the implicit opt-in that had applied since the platform's launch. Opt-in rates fell predictably: Pushwoosh's 16 million device sample showed gaming apps losing nearly a third of their opted-in base and news apps dropping 19 percent.5 Batch's 2025 benchmark, drawn from more than 800 billion messages across 10,000 apps, reported Android opt-in falling from 85 percent to 67 percent in a year and the cross-platform average settling at 61 percent.6

Every step subtracts a degree of sender control. Some of it passes to the user, and that is a good thing: a person deciding what is allowed to interrupt them is the channel working as it should. The rest passes to the platform, and that is the part that should concern a sender, because the platform's judgment is opaque, unappealable, and increasingly made by a model rather than by a setting the user chose. Over fifteen years the channel has been rebuilt around one assumption: the receiver's attention is a scarce resource the platform is obliged to defend. It defends that resource for its own reasons as...