Notify with air horn 📢

Gm and happy Saturday!

If you’ve ever used iMessage, you’re probably familiar with the concept of muting notifications. Whether you are trying to spend uninterrupted time with your family or just get some sleep, it is a powerful feature.

If you send someone with notifications silenced a text it will say “[contact-name] has notifications silenced” with an option to “Notify Anyway”. Since the sender has the power to override the desire of the recipient for silence it sortof defeats the whole point of the feature.

Of course, if people were rational they would respect someone else’s desire for peace and quiet, but let’s be real. People are not rational.

That being the case, let’s just notify them with an air horn.

This is not the right solution, but it makes me think about the importance of the specificity of language. “Notify Anyway” is such a casual way of phrasing this that I’d bet people override it all the time. “Notify if it’s urgent” would create more friction.

All that said, I’m sure Apple tested many permutations of this before going this direction.

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