The Mighty Eagle Soars — The Brooks Review

Angry Birds sends out a notification after an hour, reminding you about the super item/bird you can use. I can’t work out Ben’s tone; he seems very upbeat about this.

This seems like a pretty good way to subtly remind your users that your app exists.

To me this sounds terrible, and not in the least subtle. What concerns me is if other apps follow Angry Bird’s lead, which is likely, considering Angry Birds’s success. Image if every app started regularly throwing out notifications, to remind you about their existence. I can’t help but think of ‘A network cable is unplugged’, ‘Windows updates are turned off’, ‘Something is out of date’ and so on. Except iOS notifications are more intrusive. I don’t like notifications.

Of course, those who know can turn off notifications, but I point to Ben’s earlier post, where he quotes Andy Ihnatko:

Walt wanted to make sure that if you came to Disney World, you would have a fantastic time. And he succeeded. But he also wanted to make sure that you wouldn’t even have the option of having a bad time.

There shouldn’t even be an option to have a notification overload. I hope applications can be rejected for notification abuse.