Notifications are quiet

Why they are quiet

Most apps ask permission to notify you the first time you open them, before you know what they would send. Fold'em takes the other route. It asks iOS for the provisional kind, which needs no prompt and no decision from you: notifications are delivered to Notification Center, with no banner across the screen and no sound. So they are all there, in the list, and none of them has ever interrupted you.

That is the permanent floor. A phone that declines the louder kind, or never gets asked, keeps working exactly as described and misses nothing.

The one place it changes

The ask for full delivery happens once, as a beat in the setup act after your circle is in place, and it can be declined. Declining raises nothing at all: no prompt is spent, so it can still be raised later. Only the iOS dialog itself can spend the prompt, and once you have answered Don't Allow there, iOS will not present it again from inside any app.

For everyone else, and that includes every install made before the beat existed, the route is one row in Settings. Under the Notifications switch a row appears reading Allow alerts, with the line They arrive quietly today, in Notification Center only. Tapping it raises the real iOS prompt. Once you grant it the row disappears on the spot, because there is nothing left to do. If iOS has already been told no, the row instead reads Allow alerts in Settings over iOS will not ask again from here, and opens iOS Settings.

The row is absent when nothing would come of it: when delivery is already full, and when the Notifications switch above it is off. A row that could not work would be worse than no row.

What actually gets sent

Four kinds share one Notification Center and one switch, and no others exist. Two come from the server: the one that tells you your app deletion lock has come off, which reads App deletion lock is off over You can delete apps on this phone again, and the process updates that follow an exit, a handover, an invite, a term completing, a lapse release or a keyholder stepping down. Two come from your own phone: the reminder before a free trial ends, and motivation lines, which ship switched off and send nothing until you set a count in Settings.

What this does not do

Turning Fold'em's Notifications switch off does not stop the server sending the two kinds it sends, because a switch on a phone cannot reach back and unsend something. What it does control is what the phone does about it: while it is off, Fold'em never asks iOS for permission and never routes a tap on a notification anywhere. There is deliberately no switch per kind, because two of the four are server sent and a control that could not honour its own promise is worse than one honest switch. And none of these notifications enforce anything: no notification blocks an app, releases one, or changes a wait, and nothing about being quiet or loud changes what is blocked on this phone.