The home screen is the primary substrate you interact with notifications. New notifications, and high priority (as delineated by the operating system) notifications are displayed here. Notifications you’ve already seen once disappear below the fold, requiring a deliberate scroll to see.
Of course, you don’t tend to do so. It is whatever that is visible to you that you consciously interact with. Otherwise, the home screen is largely a barrier to you seeing the rest of the phone. With Face ID, it largely exists to be swiped away.
Since moving from Android, this has become a new problem for me: I do not have a home for my “medium” priority notification.
What is a medium priority notification? It would be uncouth to say a message from a friend that I am not in a position to reply to, so I will use the example of a Facebook Marketplace notification. I do want to reply to it, but the moment I see it may not be a good time period to dedicate serious amounts of time to it. I want to be reminded again.
But I won’t. It will disappear into the ether, and I will rediscover it days later. And societal norms will be broken, and the discussion likely scuppered.
Say you’re at an airport, scrambling to find your ticket. You may see a message from your friend you want to reply to, but there are other priorities. The sea of people waiting behind you, as you klutz about the phone interface. Of course that message is not appropriate to respond to now. Like the others, that notification will disappear into the ether too.
I do not accept the status badges as a workable solution. They are visual noise that I disable. They do not fix this paradigm. They do not even represent notifications, but rather an arbitrary “unread items in application”. That unread list could consist of anything, including items I deliberately do not want to interact with in the near term. It does not represent the granularity I want.
Android solved these problems years ago. I was content with the notification system in Ice Cream Sandwich, and all of the changes since they have been iterative improvements. It shocks me that the king of usability, Apple, has not caught up.