When you are ghosted by your phone
Summary
We are more reachable than ever, yet constantly missing the memo as the useful gets filtered out along with the fluff when it comes to notifications
A few weeks ago, I was obsessively checking my phone, hoping to see a notification from Google Docs. I had shared a piece with my editor and wanted to hear her thoughts. A day passed. Then two. Nothing.
A few days later, while opening the doc for something else, I noticed she’d already made comments and edits—all sitting there silently. I just never got the notification.
After a little digging, I discovered I now had to manually enable notifications to be alerted if someone made changes to my document—a setting I didn’t remember touching. I had been getting updates smoothly for years. So, who was at fault? The app or the device?
This, I’ve since realised, is our new normal. Our phones are constantly buzzing—someone liked something, someone sent a meme, someone’s going live. So we mute things. Group chats. Promotional apps. I’ve turned off push notifications for all social platforms. But what’s frustrating is that even the apps we don’t mute—Email, WhatsApp, Google Docs in my case—often go quiet.
Last month, Swaraj Ghosh, a 30-year-old financial professional from Delhi, didn’t receive a Gmail notification about his bank’s KYC request. Luckily, he saw the email while manually scrolling through his inbox a few days later. “I had to visit the bank to update my account information because of this," he says.
“Sometimes, when I turn on my data or Wi-Fi after a long time, I don’t receive all my WhatsApp notifications," says Pooja Sanwal, 21, a marketing professional from Mumbai. She now checks most apps manually after having revoked push notifications permission for them. “Otherwise, I’d just blame myself that there are so many notifications constantly pouring in, it’s easy to miss some."
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It’s a paradox of our times: we’re more reachable than ever yet constantly missing the memo. Somewhere between the mute buttons we hit in self-defence and the background decisions our apps make for us, the useful also gets filtered out with the fluff.
A cursory search for “not getting notifications" on Google, Reddit or X throws up the usual suspects. Truecaller notifications often get suppressed on iPhones. Slack users routinely complain about missed @mentions. There was widespread clamour recently about iPhones failing to deliver push notifications. And if you’ve enabled Android’s battery optimisation feature, techies will tell you: it often kills off certain push alerts unless you manually whitelist them app by app.
Essentially, we’ve built a system so bloated that it now eats its own alerts. A notification ecosystem that is both overwhelming and unreliable—like building a house with 50 doorbells, and not telling anyone which ones actually work.
And the real tragedy? No one can tell if the silence is a bug, a feature, or just your phone doing what it thinks is best for you.
No wonder we blame ourselves. Maybe we turned something off. Maybe we forgot to check the right box. Maybe we’re just bad at being available. So we play detective. We check the settings. Uninstall and reinstall apps. We google “why am I not getting notifications for so and so". We write to support. Restart the phone. And then we wait, hoping our device decides we’re notification-worthy again.
But what if it’s not us? What if, somewhere down the line, our machines—in their endless pursuit of efficiency—started ghosting us? And now, we’re stuck in this situationship.
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