For all the weird ad/spam accusations I've heard against Android, it shocks me how much this seems to be an iOS issue. I can say I've never, ever had a problem with this in Android, and if I did, most every app that I use that I can think of allows me to enabled/disable different types of notifications (FB/Twitter/etc). It's also a tiny bit amusing that one of the solutions is to make the Settings more sane and make them live inside their application like Android.
> For all the weird ad/spam accusations I've heard against Android, it shocks me how much this seems to be an iOS issue.
Your shock is misplaced, since this issue is rampant on both platforms. Shitty software developers will do anything sleazy to make a quick buck.
I noticed that all of the spam I encountered was from games that had their own in-game currency. After the <blah>ing-With-Friends / Draw Something fads died out and I removed those Zynga games, I can't remember the last time I saw a garbage notification.
I wonder if it's a UX difference. I don't use iOS, but looking at those notifications, they seem obtrusive and demanding of your attention. Whereas in Android, the notifications just accumulate in the tray at the top without really getting in the way.
But even given that Android notification SPAM would be less annoying than iOS notification SPAM seems to be, why don't I ever see sketchy Android apps even trying that? Am I just not downloading apps from the wrong places?
AirPush was one company that did (does?) sell ads as Android push notifications. On the whole, they're really not that widely used anymore, though - partly because Android users pushed back hard against them about a year ago, IIRC, but also because the newest version or two of Android makes it really easy to identify the offending app and disable the notifications.
If I remember correctly, the pushback was before the new notification tray, so it may have been Android's own response to the problem.
It is now against the Play store developer TOS to have notifications unless they clearly identify what App it is coming from, I think this makes things like AirPush much more difficult to pull off.
You know, I'd noticed that you can easily find out what apps generate notifications but it literally had never even occurred to me that that was the reason for that addition.
There was a company for a while that was trying to do that. People exploded with anger (number one, it was hard to identify what app was the cause, number two, it was as annoying as it much be for iOS users). Almost all apps removed it, the company changed strategy if I recall and Google threatened to ban their apps.
But other than one Zynga game, I never, ever get spam notifications and that Zynga game was installed for about an hour or two.
Good news, everyone! Android (as of 4.1 Jelly Bean) lets you disable notifications on a per-app basis. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this on this thread yet. You'll miss the "it's your turn to Draw Something!" notifications, but, c'mon, will you really miss them?
Interesting. My Android phone, which I use only for development and testing tons of apps, has multiple apps that are essentially blatant malware. They send push notifications that appear to be from some ad network that click through to a shady website that's trying to get me to install some other Android app.
