Farhad Manjoo:

Another idea is to let you impose more fine-grained controls over notifications. Today, when you let an app send you mobile alerts, it’s usually an all-or-nothing proposition — you say yes to letting it buzz you, and suddenly it’s buzzing you all the time.

Mr. Harris suggested that Apple could require apps to assign a kind of priority level to their notifications. “Let’s say you had three notification levels — heavy users, regular users and lite, or Zen,” Mr. Harris said.

My question is: Why let any app issue you notifications ever? Here are the notifications I get on my phone: Text messages from my family. That's it. Everyone and everything else has to wait until I'm ready.