Why Notifications Get Ignored: 794,525 of Them, Counted

Everyone has a reminder app, and everyone has a story about the reminder they swiped away without reading. The usual explanation is "notification overload." The data says something more specific: people are not ignoring notifications in general. They are ignoring a particular kind, and opening another kind almost every time.

Two datasets from the same lab

Martin Pielot and colleagues have logged real phone notifications in two studies four years apart.

The first, in 2014, followed 15 people for one week with a logging app. They received 63.5 notifications a day on average, mostly from messengers and email, and typically viewed them within minutes whether or not the phone was on silent. Of the 6,854 notifications in the final dataset, 3,340 came from messengers (WhatsApp, Google Talk, SMS), 2,210 from email, 1,035 from "other" apps including calendar and updates, and 269 from social networks. When a notification was viewed from the drawer, people continued into the app only 41.1 percent of the time and left it 58.9 percent of the time.

The second, published in 2018 and titled "Dismissed!", is much larger: 794,525 notifications from 278 phone users over several weeks. The median user received 56 notifications a day. The authors split them into five categories and reported two things per category: how many arrived each day, and the "conversion rate," meaning the share where the person opened the app before clearing the notification.

Daily median volume per user:

• Messaging (one-to-one chats): 18

• Group messaging: 7

• Email: 2

• Non-social apps (everything else, including reminders and utilities): 2

• Social networks: 1

Conversion rate, the share actually opened:

• Messaging: 63.67 percent

• Group messaging: 65.81 percent

• Email: 15.47 percent

• Social: 26.55 percent

• Non-social apps: 16.19 percent

Where the attention actually goes

I multiplied the median daily volume for each category by its conversion rate to estimate how many notifications per day a typical user opens, and what share of those opens come from messages. The paper reports the two sets of figures separately and does not combine them. One caveat: the per-category medians sum to 30, not 56, because a median of medians is not the median of the total. The shares are still the useful part.

• Messaging: 18 x 63.67 percent = about 11.5 opens a day

• Group messaging: 7 x 65.81 percent = about 4.6

• Email: 2 x 15.47 percent = about 0.3

• Social: 1 x 26.55 percent = about 0.3

• Non-social apps: 2 x 16.19 percent = about 0.3

• Total: about 17 opens a day, of which roughly 16, or 95 percent, are messages

So a typical user opens about 17 notifications a day, and nearly all of them are messages from people. The remaining five notifications a day, from email, social feeds, and every other app on the phone combined, produce less than one open between them.

The ratio that matters for reminders: a notification from a messaging app is opened 63.67 percent of the time, and a notification from a non-social app 16.19 percent. That is a factor of 3.9. The same words, sent two different ways, have very different odds of being read.

Why messages win

The 2014 paper asked participants why. The leading reason was social pressure: a message is from a person who is waiting, and half of participants said they generally respond within a few minutes, with the other half within an hour. They also believed others expected the same of them.

The 2018 paper adds that non-social notifications are not just ignored, they are dismissed quickly. Looking at what happened in the first 2, 5, 10 and 30 minutes after arrival, the authors found that these notifications tend to be swiped away fast, while messages are read and acted on. Email sits in a third bucket: left unattended for longer than anything else.

In other words, the phone has trained its owner to triage by source. The lock screen gets a glance, the sender gets sorted, and only one category reliably survives the sort.

What this means for a reminder you need to see

A reminder app is, by category, a non-social app. Its notification looks like the one in six. That is the structural reason a reminder set in good faith on Monday gets swiped on Thursday without being read. It is not that the reminder was bad. It is that it arrived in the lane the owner has learned to clear without reading.

A reminder that arrives as a text message sits in the other lane. It shows up in the same thread list as messages from family and friends, with the same social expectation attached, and the 2014 study classified SMS alongside WhatsApp as a messenger. That is the whole design behind Reminder Textapp: the reminder is a text from a number you know, so it gets the attention rate of a message rather than an alert.

Two limits on this. The 2018 "messaging" category was 89.5 percent WhatsApp, so the 63.67 percent figure is mostly about chat apps, not SMS specifically. And conversion measured opening the app, not doing the task. A reminder read is not a reminder acted on. But the gap between 16 percent and 64 percent is large enough that the delivery channel is clearly not a detail.

Reducing the noise helps too

The other finding in the 2018 data is that users do not appear flooded outside of messaging. Two emails, two app alerts, and one social notification a day is not many, and the authors suggest people may already have turned off the rest. If you have, good. The reminders that matter should then be the few things that still reach the lock screen, and they should look like a message.

Try it by text

Text Hi to (720) 315-7147 to start Reminder Textapp. Then text any reminder in a sentence: "submit timesheet Friday at 4pm" or "water plants every Sunday morning". The reminder arrives as a text, on any phone, with nothing to install and no account. Your first 20 messages are free. See textapp.co/apps/reminder.