I like to use my phone as a tool and not as a social media device, so that I am less likely to be used by social media companies. I would much rather go to my phone in order to accomplish something that will bring value to my life such as meditation, journal writing, scriptures, note taking, news bits, and keeping plants. In particular, I love to use my phone in order to promote my mental and physical health.
As a result of keeping my phone as a tool, I will turn off notifications to certain apps so that I am not consistently looking at my phone. But some of those apps I would like to get notifications anyway, because I almost always habitually go to that app to “see what’s up”. Sometimes, nothing is up, and that gets a little disappointing (working on it). Getting notifications would encourage me to go to the app when needed.
For example I would still like to get news notifications from Winno. I love to use Winno becauase of the facts that Winno states; I would much rather get fact bits than read opinions. But I don’t want to get notified every time a news bit gets published. I would then be be going into Winno very often to see news bits. I would much rather go into Winno at some point of the day to recover news bits.
So I hear in iOS 15, I can set summaries times each day. Any notifications can get grouped together and postponed until a designated time. Bingo! So I grouped most chats, news, and emails to the notification summary. This should be fantastic! And at those parts of the day, I can go in and review what can notify me.
An additional feature that was included in iOS 15 was focus mode. That should be extremely beneficial for me too! I can set different device modes, and those modes can include “permissions to notify”. I quickly set personal and work modes to permit notifications from the right applications.
I like where Apple is going with their technology. If I could assign a “like percentage” to Apple, it would be in the range of 80%-90%. Some of the things I like that they are pushing for are: user privacy, health, and a stable technology experience. Focus mode and notification summaries just so happens to fit in the health part; I should be able to have better mental health thanks to these!