Twitter has acquired OpenBack to improve notifications 

Twitter has announced that they have acquired mobile marketing company OpenBack in order to make push notifications something you actually want to receive. 

According to Twitter’s head of consumer product, Jay Sullivan, who confirmed the acquisition on Twitter, OpenBack will help the social media giant “deliver notifications at the right time, in a way that puts people’s privacy first.”

In the brief thread of tweets that announced this acquisition, Sullivan didn’t explain exactly how Twitter’s planned push notifications will respect people’s privacy, however, he did explain that the new push notifications should be “timely, relevant and engaging,” which all sound like good things to us. 

According to Sullivan “millions of people” use Twitter’s push notifications to visit the app each day, so it’s no wonder that the company is looking to improve this often disregarded feature that’s turned off by many users as a result.

2/ The best push notifications bring people to the conversations they care about on Twitter. But irrelevant notifications are a distraction. With millions of people visiting Twitter via notifications every day, we want them to be timely, relevant and engaging.

— Jay Sullivan (@jaysullivan) April 12, 2022

Despite how powerful a tool push notifications can be for the right app, Sullivan went on to note that “irrelevant notifications are a distraction,” which, obviously, the majority of users could do without. 

As a result of this potential annoying distraction, we’ve recently seen Google announce that the upcoming Android 13 will make apps ask for permission before getting to send you push notifications, which should hopefully cut down on the number of notifications cluttering up your phone.