D9D9 Push Notifications: Allow, Refuse or Switch Off

Push notifications are messages a website can show you through your phone’s own notification system, and a site must ask your permission first. The D9D9 lobby is an H5 web app that opens in a plain phone browser (see HTML5 games and the browser), and when it loads it shows a Permission Notice asking you to turn notifications on. You decide at that moment, and you can change your mind later.

What allowing push notifications does

MDN says “the user needs to grant the current origin permission to display system notifications”. The request is a dialog asking you to allow or deny notifications from that site. Allowed notifications are drawn by the operating system, so they “can be shown even when the user has switched tabs or moved to a different app”.

Turn push notifications off in 5 steps

These steps work in the order of the lobby’s own prompts, then in Chrome on Android.

1. Press Cancel on the Permission Notice. When the lobby loads, the notice asks to allow notifications and has a Cancel button.
2. Choose block if the browser asks. A browser dialog may follow the notice; pick the option that blocks notifications.
3. Close the promotional popups. They follow the notice and each has a close button.
4. Block the site in Chrome on Android. Open the lobby, tap the page info icon left of the address bar, tap Permissions and change the notification setting to block.
5. Block notifications for every site if you want. Tap More, then Settings, then Site settings, then Notifications, and turn the setting off at the top.

Those paths come from Google’s Chrome help page for Android. For iPhone, read Apple’s own page at support.apple.com rather than a copy.

Block notifications you already allowed

If you tapped allow once and regret it, step 4 reverses it for that site alone.

Notification spam: when the prompts will not stop

Notification spam is a pile of prompts, banners and popups, and each one comes from a different layer. The Permission Notice is the lobby asking, the browser dialog is Chrome asking, and the popups are banners with a close button.

Chrome also has a “Use quieter messaging” option in the same Notifications settings, which moves permission requests out of the popup position. Set it if prompts keep interrupting a sign-up; if you are stuck on the number field, the phone number format page covers it, and a screen that sits sideways is a landscape mode settings matter.

Check that push notifications are off

Test the result in under a minute, with no need to leave the lobby.

1. Open the lobby and tap the page info icon left of the address bar.
2. Tap Permissions and read the notification line.
3. Confirm it says blocked, then reload the lobby and press Cancel if the notice returns.