> there was zero guarantee that notifications would ever show up, and they seemed to fall through very often, when the client (at least with Firefox Android) sits in the background
That could also be a longer conversation, but yeah, that was also my conclusion, and again... I don't have proof that this is Google's fault, but it stands out to me that notifications as they're built today are primarily useful for spammy advertisements and engagement requests and are extremely unreliable for everything else.
If your primary use case for notifications is telling the user that your blog published a new article or reminding them to check into their account or advertising a sale, then notifications are great; and you don't really care about reliability in that instance.
If you want notifications to be something the user can really rely on, ie calendar appointments, sign-in attempts, etc... they don't seem like they're trustworthy enough to do that.
Of course, we need those OS-level restrictions around notifications to stop abuse and spam, but that's only because it's super-easy to start spamming the user in the first place. And my pet conspiracy theory is that Google on some level looked at notifications and said "it's more important that it be easy for a blog to get somebody to click yes on this, than it is for us to build a transparent process to the user that would allow us to make the delivery more granular and more reliable." Instead of making it harder for websites to get notifications permissions in the first place, Google made them less reliable; the model is that you will have a bunch of sites that can spam you but they'll spam you unreliably.
Again, I can't prove that, and maybe things have improved, but it's just weird how the entire spec seems designed around advertisements/spam, even to the detriment of everything else.
That could also be a longer conversation, but yeah, that was also my conclusion, and again... I don't have proof that this is Google's fault, but it stands out to me that notifications as they're built today are primarily useful for spammy advertisements and engagement requests and are extremely unreliable for everything else.
If your primary use case for notifications is telling the user that your blog published a new article or reminding them to check into their account or advertising a sale, then notifications are great; and you don't really care about reliability in that instance.
If you want notifications to be something the user can really rely on, ie calendar appointments, sign-in attempts, etc... they don't seem like they're trustworthy enough to do that.
Of course, we need those OS-level restrictions around notifications to stop abuse and spam, but that's only because it's super-easy to start spamming the user in the first place. And my pet conspiracy theory is that Google on some level looked at notifications and said "it's more important that it be easy for a blog to get somebody to click yes on this, than it is for us to build a transparent process to the user that would allow us to make the delivery more granular and more reliable." Instead of making it harder for websites to get notifications permissions in the first place, Google made them less reliable; the model is that you will have a bunch of sites that can spam you but they'll spam you unreliably.
Again, I can't prove that, and maybe things have improved, but it's just weird how the entire spec seems designed around advertisements/spam, even to the detriment of everything else.