Thoughts about spam notifications in iOS

I try to keep my notifications minimal. Only those which are important should get through.

But when I receive notifications like this my blood boils:

Amazon is not the sole culprit. When I received several notifications from The Fork I have confronted them on Twitter. They have promised to do something about it, and then a few days later I was spammed again… with the same notification.

Although this is forbidden by Apple App Store Review Guidelines, Design section 4.5.3, big firms do not care.

I think the main problem comes from the fact that these cost nothing and are invisible to apple. I think we should be able to report these to Apple, in the same way it is done for spam e-mail.

Where to put the report button?

Putting a button on each notification would be an overkill, it would be easy to hit it with a fat thumb.

It could go into the slide over or 3D touch menu in the notification center. But the problem is that if a notification pops up while the phone is unlocked, and you tap it by reflex, it gets a free pass. These are maddening.

My idea would be to put a section inside the Privacy tab. This view would display last few notifications you have received, with an option to report them to Apple and an option to ignore notifications with the same text from this application. At first, this would not have much impact, but over time Apple could use this data to pressure App publishers and maybe even start training Siri to act as a spam filter.