One of the key reasons why I can’t see myself owning a current-generation iPhone is the horrible notifications system. To be honest, the flexible/powerful notifications provided by Android are one of the huge selling points of the phone OS.

Recently Ben Brooks and Marco Arment have commented on notifications and I think that while they miss the point, they’re too jaded by iOS experiences to understand how the Android notification system, when configured what I’ll term as “correctly”, just works.

Both Ben and Marco make the point that if everything becomes an in-your-face notification, then any notion of importance is lost. They’re right. The other notion is that notifications should be easily ignored/dismissed if desired.

The Android notification system allows the user to control these things on a granular basis. In my case, the only time my phone will buzz is with a (relatively rare) SMS message. It doesn’t buzz me for Twitter mentions, emails, or anything else that’s likely not of urgent importance. If you want it to bug you constantly, you can configure it that way, but that’s not required. To address the second issue, it’s easy to drop down and view, or shove up and hide, the notification list. There’s a “Clear” button if you want to dismiss them all, but if you want to scan quickly through the notifications and pick out certain ones, you can do that as well.

In short, I think the Android notification system (when setup as desired) addresses the concerns. That said, those in love with iOS might think that the vast amount of configuration options for notifications would be quite un-Apple-like. The problem with Apple’s one-system-fits-all approach is that a single system won’t ever make all happy.