Nearby Notifications was a service Google launched in 2015. It aimed to provide users with notifications on useful apps and websites based on their location.
For example, users received messages about free WiFi nearby or a coffee-delivery app. They could get museum guides, or even when the next bus would arrive.
In theory, the service should have allowed users to get frequently updated on what’s around them. In practice, however, the app turned out to be a way for marketers to spam people. A lot of businesses were promoting themselves by pushing messages to people non-stop.
That caused an ever-growing number of people to seek a way to disable the feature. All this led to Google’s decision to discontinue the service. In October 2018, they announced that the app failed to meet the company quality standards, and the result was a poor experience for users. Because of this, Nearby Notifications was shut down on December 6, 2018.
