I don't understand how Android's notification system is supposed to be a cluttered mess relative to iOS. Looking at screenshots, it looks they're both pretty similar, but iOS having more stuff in there.
On second thought, I shouldn't have complained about Android in this way. I haven't used ICS, which might have solved the problems I've encountered, and I didn't explain what I don't like about Android's notification system. So I've removed that sentence from the article.
I think part of the problem comes down to application behavior. On my Android phone, tons of applications generate notifications that really shouldn't, so the notification widget constantly fills up with needless stuff.
Well, I haven't used iOS since version 3, but I see screenshots with notifications for weather, stocks, words with friends, pretty much everything on your phone.
Maybe I've just got notifications turned off for other apps, but on Gingerbread, I only get notifications for texts, emails and updates.
Weather and Stocks aren't notifications. I guess the idea there is that you can see the weather forecast and your stocks at a single glance, but I've turned them off. They're annoying, I agree.
As for everything else, apps that want to send notifications are forced to ask for permission the first time you open them. Presumably, you'd want to grant this permission to Words with Friends, since otherwise, you never know when you have to play :-)
But other than that, you just hit "no" every time, and that's that.
> Well, I haven't used iOS since version 3, but I see screenshots with notifications for weather, stocks
Weathers and stocks are "widgets" (except only those 2 are available and they can only be displayed in the notification center).
Aside from that, I'm not sure how it works on Android but on iOS an application must explicitly register for notifications the first time it's opened and this launches a dialog asking the user what kind of notification it allows.
So it's quite easy to tell applications to buzz off and not notify anything.
Lots of apps do like to push their notifications. It's because of one of two reasons most of the time: a) more time in their app to get you to see/click ads or b) Android 2.2 or earlier killed apps that weren't doing much. Having a notification fixed that.
