 So here's a question. Why are notifications still such a pain to deal with? I mean, if you've been paying attention, there've been lots of stories about how phones are hacking our brains and distracting us and keeping us from focusing on what we're supposed to be doing. Without getting too deep into it, I think bad notifications are the result of bad economic incentives that have been created by bad software design. They pop up on your lock screen, they make your phone make noise, they literally cover what you're looking at when they come in when you're using your phone. All of that stuff demands your attention, and all of that attention equals real money for app makers who don't necessarily have your best interests at heart. And so while I think we can fix how we all set our notifications, I also think we have to push companies like Apple and Google to fix their software design. But before we can make demands of those companies, we should actually try to identify what's wrong with that software design. I wanna start with Apple. You might know all this stuff already, but take a look at how these notifications work with a different eye. Look at them and think, do any of these notification options actually help you? If you scroll through this thing, it's just a giant, unsorted list, reverse chronological of all of your notifications with no sense of what's more important than the other thing. And then if you get beyond that, what do you do when one of these notifications pop up? Do you swipe a little bit? Well, that does one thing. If you swipe too hard, it jumps to a whole other screen. Or you can force press it, and that pops up other options. You can tap it and that might open it, or maybe not, who knows? It's all just super confusing UI, and it's not intuitive at all what you're supposed to do with it. Okay, so let's take a look at some of these notifications here. So the first one is just allow notifications. You can turn that off. That's like the nuclear option, and I actually recommend you use that a bunch. But say you need notifications. Then you've got sounds, badge app icon, show on lock screen, show on history, and then shows banners. And that's a lot of options. In fact, how many options is that? We should do some math here. Okay, math time. On this screen right here, you can turn notifications on or off, so that's two. And then these are also on or off, so there's two more options here, here, here, and here. So that's one, two, three, four of those. And then this one, it's actually three, because you can choose between these different things here. So I thought this was gonna be a factorial thing, but since the order doesn't matter, it's actually just a multiplication problem. So this is two times two times two times two. That's two to the fourth times three. Two to the fourth is 16 times three, it's 48. Let's not forget about this guy up here, because it toggles on everything else. Add that down, plus two, you end up with 50. There are 50 different ways to set up notifications for any given app on your iPhone. Last but not least, on top of all that, there's this other whole mode called Do Not Disturb, which turns everything off, but not quite everything, so you gotta figure that out too. I call all this confusion the mystery of the checkboxes. I mean, the joke isn't that funny. Can we just turn the lights back on and go back to the video? I mean, it is a mystery, but it's not that big a mystery, I guess is what I'm saying. Anyway, Apple's philosophy is you should just let notifications flow by. Don't try and read every one, and don't try and organize your entire phone life through them, but I think that's kinda dumb. Some notifications are super important. So then the question is, does anybody do it better? So this is the part where I'm supposed to go really deep into the history of smartphones, and show you how Symbian phones, and Palm phones, and Blackberries, and WebOS phones, and Windows phones all handle notifications differently, and where each innovation came from, and I would love to do that, but we don't have the time, and also all of those phones are dead. RIP all those phones. Instead, we can just focus on how Android does things, and I'm not gonna go through all of it in as much detail as I did with the iPhone, I just wanna point out a few places where Android is smarter. And I do have a caveat, because this is Android, and Android manufacturers are god awful at sending out updates to their phones, and being on the most recent versions, so we're just gonna use the Pixel 2 as an example. Got it? Cool. Let's start with the notification shade. The first thing you're gonna notice is that it's ordered by priority, so music's at the top, and then there's messages, and then there's all the other garbage, so you know it's important right away. The next thing is grouping, and this is the most important thing that I love in Android, is if I have 50 notifications from Twitter, they all get stacked up into this tiny little one line thing, and then I can expand it if I wanna see it, or dismiss all of it altogether all at once. Another thing that I love is if you're using the phone, some notifications, instead of putting a shade down and covering the top of your screen, they can just be non-interruptive, they just pop a little icon in the notification tray, and you can deal with it later, which is great. And then there's this new thing called channels, which is a really complicated thing, where all of an app's notification settings get put into a single screen, where you can choose different notification options for all the different kinds of notification the app wants to send to you. So you can choose whether it's high priority, and makes your phone make noise, or low priority, and it's silent, or it doesn't get notifications at all, and you can do that not just for the whole app, but for all the little things that an app wants to tell you. I call these channel settings the Android version of the mystery of the checkboxes. No, we're not? No, yes, we're doing it? Okay, we're doing it, great. The checkboxes are just as bad on Android. In fact, they're worse. There's so many more checkboxes on Android than there are on iOS, so it's weird for me to praise it. The difference is that the end states of those checkboxes for notifications are actually way more humane. They're more in my control, and they're less annoying than what happens to you on the iPhone. The other reason I'm less annoyed with Android notifications is that you can get to all those checkboxes directly from the notification itself. I'm not saying that Android notifications are perfect. They do need work also. In fact, I would love to see some of that fancy machine learning that Google's always talking about applied more to the problem of notifications. Look, here's the truth. Notifications, they're the new email. They're just as important. But email has all these tools for managing these messages. It's got folders for sorting and stars and archiving and snoozing and all kinds of other crap. We need to be empowered to manage our notifications just like we're empowered to manage our email. Or we need a whole different approach to solving this problem entirely, I don't know. Earlier this year, there were a lot of stories about how everyone's real mad at notifications. They were in the New York Times. So Farhad Manjoo said Apple should design a less addictive phone. Nellie Bowles did a really interesting story on people gray screening their phones so that all the color doesn't hack their lizard brains. Although lizards maybe don't see color, I don't know. Look that up later. Anyway, a bunch of this stuff comes from this movement called Time Well Spent that started with a guy named Tristan Harris who was a design ethicist at Google. And I don't disagree with any of it. It is possible for your phone to put you in a permanent state of distraction. The metaphor everybody uses is that it's like a slot machine. You pull down on the notification shade just like you pull on a lever on a slot machine. I don't really like that metaphor because I think it takes away too much power from you. The person who, I don't know, owns the slot machine, the phone, you should only give them that power if they deliver something really valuable to you. And too often they don't. But Apple, I'm sorry. You need to help us out here. There's only so much that we as users can do given all of the options you've given us because notifications, they're not going away and just treating them as little puffy clouds floating by on our lock screens. That isn't gonna work. Got a few people I need to thank for this video. I wanna thank Vlad Sabah for coming up with the metaphor of iPhone notifications being puffy clouds floating away. Patrick Lopato, thank you for fixing my math. I had it super wrong and you saved me. Also thanks to former Verge reporter Jeff Blagden who in a completely different context came up with the phrase, the mystery of the check boxes, which I just deeply love. And of course, thank you for watching.