Push notifications arrived as an opt-in prompt, and the split is really between people who answer that prompt and people who never do. YouGov's 2021 survey found 47% of American smartphone users felt they got too many notifications while 38% said the volume was about right - and the people in the first group mostly do something about it: 42% said they adjust notification settings, 39% turn notifications off entirely, 8% delete the offending app. The flashpoint is not the alert itself but who sends it. Only 6% of users thought it reasonable for a brand to send promotional messages more than once a day; roughly a fifth each preferred a few times a week, once a week, or less often than that. So a phone that buzzes for a message from a friend, a delivery or a bank alert is experienced very differently from one that buzzes for a sale. People who have curated their notifications tend to describe them as useful; people who have left every default switched on tend to describe the same feature as noise.