Do Not Disturb

Basic Apple Guy:

A few weeks ago, I accidentally turned on Do Not Disturb, not for an hour, not until the evening, not until I left my current location, but in perpetuity. I haven’t turned it off, nor have I wanted to, and honestly, it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time.

It is a very tempting option, albeit the nuclear one.

The sad fact is that the current system for notifications on our mobile devices makes All or Nothing the default options, and doesn’t give the user much control over how many, what kind, when, etc.

Yes, it’s possible to go into Settings and fine-tune them, but the user has to a) find the relevant setting, b) work out which changes will give them what they want.

It doesn’t help that some apps and services are more than happy to abuse this system, regarding the mere downloading and opening of the app as all the permission they require, and the permission dialog as a formality.

Speaking personally, I’ve turned off most notifications and pushed the remainder to the Notification Centre so I only see them when I want to. But that was with a comparatively small number of installed apps — I would imagine that the average mobile device user would have a lot more work to do.