While I have been cleaning up my emails and unsubscribing from as many things as possible, I noticed a recent uptick in amazon notifications coming to my phone.

I have the Amazon app installed, and I use it rarely. But when I do, I use the smile variant of amazon which donates some tiny fraction of the order to a local non profit. I figure, if I’m going to feed the beast, I might was well have a morsel go to something good.

I have been deleting apps, disabling notifications for some time, so I went into the Amazon app settings to stop these advertisements from popping up on my screen. Guess what happened? They block you from participating in AmazonSmile if you try to disable “Personalized Notifications” in the app settings. Disgusting.

Looking back on my notifications in Apple’s screen time tool, I found that the amount of notifications have ramped up dramatically. 49 notifications over Thanksgiving, 128 during the week after Thanksgiving, and 57 following that. The week I’m writing this, its on pace for about 8 per day. 

I’ve since uninstalled the app. Shame on you Amazon, and the product people who made this decision.