Which notifications does Fold'em send?

The four kinds

Process updates. Something moved in a process you are part of, and the phone that owns the account is told. Twelve moments qualify: an exit approved, an exit denied, an exit's release becoming ready to take, a handover accepted, approved, declined, expired or completed, a circle invite accepted, a term completed, protection lapsing, and a keyholder stepping away. Tapping one opens the surface it belongs to.

The deletion lock unlocking. When the 72 hour deletion lock window finishes and the server grants the unlock, it sends one note reading that the app deletion lock is off and that you can delete apps on this phone again. It exists because the restriction lifts on the server and the phone would otherwise have no way to tell you it had.

The trial reminder. One notification, scheduled on the phone that bought, three days before a free trial ends and at 19:00 local. It reads that your free trial ends on a named weekday, and under it, that there is nothing to do and to keep your commitment going. It states the end and nothing else, which stays true whether or not you have already cancelled, so it never has to guess what you meant to do.

Motivation. Lines in the voice of the block screen pack you chose, up to four a day inside a window you set. It ships at zero a day, which means off, and it is adopted in Settings or not at all.

One centre, one switch

All four arrive through the same iOS notification centre and are gated by the same single control, the Notifications switch at the top of Preferences. It is on by default and it lives on the phone, so turning it off stops the phone asking for permission, stops taps routing anywhere, and stops motivation being scheduled at all. There is no second notification system anywhere in Fold'em, and no per kind switch: motivation has its own screen for how many and when, but not a switch of its own.

Turning it off does not stop the server sending, because the server has no in app control over delivery. What it stops is the phone's side of the arrangement.

Quiet by default, and how to change it

Fold'em asks iOS for provisional authorization first, which is the tier that needs no permission dialog and delivers straight to Notification Center with no sound, no banner and nothing on the lock screen. That is the floor, and for a device that never answers anything it is permanent. It is a deliberate choice: a self exclusion app that opened with a permission prompt would spend the prompt before it had shown you a single thing it might send.

The app asks for full delivery exactly once, at a screen in the setup act headed Approve notifications, and that screen shows you three example notifications before it asks: your trial reminder, a keyholder accepting your invite, and a term completing. Allow raises the real iOS dialog. Not now raises nothing at all, spends nothing, and leaves the prompt available later. If you tap Don't Allow inside Apple's dialog, iOS will not ask again from an app, so the screen offers Open Settings instead of a second try.

For everyone the screen never reached, and everyone who said Not now, the same prompt is one row away: in Preferences, directly under the Notifications switch, a row appears reading Allow alerts with the line that they arrive quietly today, in Notification Center only. It disappears once authorization is full, because then there is nothing left to do.

What this does not do

No notification changes anything. They are display only: a push cannot unlock an app, shorten a wait, approve an exit or turn a shield off, and the server would refuse the instruction even if one carried it. There is no switch that stops the server sending, only the phone's switch that decides what happens when something arrives. Delivery is best effort, so a push can arrive late or not at all if the phone is off or offline, and the app reconciles the real state when you open it rather than trusting what a notification said. Your keyholder's emails are a separate channel with its own controls, and nothing here reaches them.