The purpose of push notifications

sivan · 07/06/2009, 03:29 PM

Apple has given the iPhone push notifications. Blogs are covering the new apps taking advantage of this advanced functionality.

It would be one thing if Apple has used these for IM applications, since after all, it is wasteful for all apps to have to poll independently for incoming messages.

But as I understand it, even internal notifications must rely on push notifications. For example, I read that simple todo apps such as OmniFocus or reQall cannot just remind the user of an impending task, unless they queue this on an external service on the web, that will then push a notification to the iPhone. In other words, any kind of notification by a 3rd party is confined to push notification, requiring a round trip to the web.

Maybe I don't understand this correctly, but why can't such apps register a notification internally on some kind of scheduler, instead of having to send this to a web service first? I fail to see the impact on battery life that a scheduled notification such as this would cause. We are talking here about simple reminders, the bread and butter of PIM apps.

Speaking of battery life: since Apple has allowed 3rd party apps on the iPhone under the restriction of not being able to run in the background or interacting with scheduling services, there hasn't been any noticeable advantage in battery life compared to other smartphones that allow background apps.

Enormous resource requirements and complications have been foisted on 3rd party developers with no discernible results so far. What then is the purpose of all this?

mrsyeltzin · 07/06/2009, 05:26 PM

My understanding of what exactly these push notifications are is limited at best, but I always thought it was the band aid solution that allows you to receive alerts from closed programs because they aren't allowed to run in the background. This seems rather stupid and half baked and isn't a solution but an excuse. I could be way off on my assessment of what a 'push notification' is though.

sivan · 07/06/2009, 06:13 PM

An app doesn't have to run, it only has to be able to queue a notification with the OS to show at some point in time even if it's not running then.

Frankly it seems like an anti-competitive policy with no engineering rationale behind it. Bloggers are falling over themselves with excitement and whole businesses form around delivering those notifications. It's absurd.