This App Sends You Super-Short Stories as Push Notifications

Some apps are notorious for sending useless and unwanted push notifications. A new type of message sent by Serial Box works differently—instead of encouraging you to open the app, it shows you a flash fiction story you can read without ever unlocking your phone, The Verge reports.

Serial box, a startup publisher that bills itself as "HBO for reading," has been bringing serialized stories to readers since 2015. Now, starting July 9, the company will begin experimenting with a whole new way to deliver manageable prose in a convenient package.

On "Microfiction Mondays," users will receive a push notification containing a flash fiction story limited to 150 characters or less. Like the other stories on the app, these pieces will be written by Serial Box's team of writers. The stories won't be available anywhere else on the app or website, so the only way to read them is to download the app and enable push notifications.

"The perfect bite-sized story for a busy afternoon filled with meetings, we hope these will provide a moment of fictional solace for our Serial Boxers," the company wrote in a blog post.

Serial box isn't the only place experimenting with how readers consume short stories. In 2011, a French startup began installing vending machines that dispense receipt-sized short fiction pieces in public spaces.

[h/t The Verge]