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As is usually the case these days, I spouted my mouth off on Twitter and started a mild fire storm.

Both Engadget and Gizmodo linked to a YouTube video of a new Jailbreak notification system called MobileNotifier. Usually I tend to ignore what is going on in the Jailbreak community, because it’s not my style, but I was slightly perturbed when the author of the video said he and “many others” described MobileNotifier as “iOS notifications done right.”

The problem is that MobileNotifier is not notifications done right. It is notifications that appease the nerdiest of the iOS market. Even in that case, it doesn’t do that great of a job.

The Problem With Notifications

Notifications on iOS have always been a pain point. Whenever the system wants to notify you of an external action such as a new text message received or a direct message on Twitter, it pops up an alert dialog with the information. At that point, you have the option to either handle it at that very moment, or dismiss it into the ether never to be seen again.

Prior to the iPhone SDK when the only alerts you were receiving were from text messages, it was manageable. As more and more apps integrate push and local notifications, however, it has become a stackable mess. Each morning when I wake up the first thing I have to do after unlocking my iPhone is tap through a sea of notifications that came in over night: text messages, Twitter direct messages, Facebook messages and a few local OmniFocus notifications. As soon as I handle a single one of those notifications, the rest of the stack is dismissed and I have no idea it ever existed. That’s not ideal.

In addition to all the issues outlined above, the tiny notifications alerts just look out of place on the 10” screen of the iPad.

There has to be a better way.

MobileNotifier Is Not That

If I were to give a letter grade to MobileNotifier, I’d say its a C. It’s not a terrible implementation by any means. It has some wonky user experience things I’ll outline in a bit, but generally it’s a well done thought experiment. That said, it is not something I can ever imagine my sister, wife or mildly tech savvy brother using or enjoying on a regular basis.¹

The key component of MobileNotifier is its Alert Dashboard. To access it you double-tap the home button to show the multitasking switcher.

A few weeks ago, my wife was having trouble with the Facebook app refusing to let her interact with the screen. My first method of diagnosis was to tell her to just quit the app in the task switcher. She looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. Even though she has been using an iPhone for over a year and has had iOS 4 installed on it since the day it shipped², she never knew the task switcher was there. Her iPhone workflow is to tap on an app, use the app and then press the home button to get back to the main screen.

In fact, I’m willing to wager that most people outside of the die hards know that feature even exists and they don’t have to. Apple has designed iOS so that it behaves without having to have any background knowledge or additional knowhow to handle the new features added to the OS over time.

By hiding the alerts dashboard in the multitasking switcher, you are not solving the problem of alerts being hidden and inaccessible to users. You are just improving the experience for the power users who have Terminal in their Dock.

The next issue is the new alert dialog itself. Whereas iOS currently pops an intrusive modal dialog up that requires the user to handle it immediately else they can’t use their phone anymore, MobileNotifier slaps a giant bar on top of your first row of apps with the notification. You can still interact with your phone with the notification displayed, as long as the app you want to interact with isn’t in that first row of apps. In the case of my iPhone, I’d be unable to access iPhone, Calendar, Photos and Camera. That’s no less intrusive than the current system. In some cases, it is even more annoying.

The Best Notification Is No Notification

In my original tweet, I explained that WebOS is my favorite notification implementation on any smartphone platform. Sebastiaan de With tends to agree with me, and does a great job of outlining what is good about WebOS.

Android’s notifications, while an improvement over iOS, are overwhelming. The notification tray is consistently filled with additional information that I don’t necessarily care for. For instance, I don’t a notification to tell me that I have successfully plugged my phone into my Mac using a USB cable. I also don’t care that an application successfully downloaded from the Marketplace. Those are things I would expect to happen without issue. If the connection or download aren’t successful, that’s when I want to be notified.

Rather than trying to skate to where the puck already is with WebOS and Android, Apple should look to eliminate the necessity of notifications as a mobile design principle. Whether that is abandoning the concept of notifications all together³ or creating a new method of displaying and maintaining them⁴, the goal of any application should be to move the development community away from intruding on a user’s mobile experience. I don’t need an alert when a friend checks in on Facebook at a nearby place. If I launch the Facebook app, by all means me. When I’m in another application, that is information overload. The problem isn’t entirely Apple’s fault. Notifications are being abused by third parties, which is what makes them unruly.

I am not sure what Apple will do to improve the notification experience in iOS 5. I’m not even sure what the best way to handle the experience would be. What would I do? I’d move notifications into a new app a la Game Center. Rather than stacking dialogs on the user’s screen, put a badge on a new Notifications app and store them in there. If a user cares about notifications, they can keep it on the home screen. If they don’t care, they can banish it away to a folder and never pay attention again.

Whatever Apple does, I can guarantee you that their solution won’t be designed with the goal of just being better than what we currently have.