Every app wants to send you notifications. Your phone is a battlefield of red badges, buzzes, and banners, all competing for a sliver of your attention. Most of them are noise.
We refuse to be noise.
The Problem
Notifications exist because apps need to pull you back. But most apps abuse this. The Green App sends you a notification every time someone two miles away complains about a dog. The Feed sends you notifications about posts from people you haven't talked to in ten years. Even your banking app is now sending "tips" about credit scores you didn't ask about.
The result is notification fatigue. People start ignoring everything, including the notifications that actually matter.
Our Approach
We started by asking a simple question: what would a user genuinely want to be interrupted for?
The list is shorter than you'd think:
- Someone messaged you about your listing. Yes, always. This is why you're here.
- Your listing got a response. You posted something for sale, someone's interested. That matters.
- Someone replied to your Porch post. You asked a question or shared a recommendation, and a neighbor responded.
- A safety alert in your neighborhood. If someone posts an urgent alert on The Porch about your block, you should know.
That's it. Four categories of notification. Everything else can wait until you open the app.
What We Don't Notify About
- New listings in categories you've browsed. That's not a notification. That's advertising.
- How many people viewed your profile. Nobody needs this interruption.
- "Your neighbors are active on The Porch!" We're not going to guilt you into opening the app.
- Weekly digest emails you didn't ask for. If you want a digest, you'll opt into one.
The Design Decisions
Bundling. If you get five replies to a Porch post in an hour, you get one notification, not five. We bundle related activity so your phone isn't buzzing all afternoon.
Timing. We don't send notifications between 10pm and 8am unless it's a safety alert. Your sleep matters more than our engagement metrics.
Easy controls. Every notification type can be turned on or off individually. Don't want Porch notifications? Turn them off. Want only messages? Done. We make this obvious, not buried in a settings maze.
Respectful defaults. New users get a conservative default: messages and safety alerts only. You opt into more, not out of less.
The Metric We Care About
Most apps measure notification engagement rates. How many people tapped the notification? We measure something different: how many people disabled notifications entirely? If that number is low, we're doing it right. It means every notification we send is worth receiving.
We'd rather send one notification that matters than ten that get swiped away. That restraint is a feature, even if it doesn't show up on a spec sheet.