Recently I reinstalled Memrise for iOS, hoping to get back into the swing of language learning, after years of not using it. I’m doing so gradually, since it’s hard to find the time in my schedule to do this now.
I’ve noticed that if I leave the app alone for a few days, it sends me a notification with some inane “fun fact” or question, such as “Did you know there are over 1000 languages in the world?”
Lighting up my phone like this is disrespectful of my time and attention, and genuinely makes me want to remove the app entirely.
For now, I settled for completely turning off notifications. This also means I can’t set any reminders or useful notifications from the app, but I genuinely prefer to sacrifice those if it means that I don’t have to deal with useless ones when I take a break from the service.
If you’re going to use shady tactics like this, I don’t think I can recommend this service to friends and colleagues in good conscience.