Apple Not So Pushy On Push Notification
Apple may have announced Push Notification to launch this month for the iPhone way back when in June and subsequently pull it from recent development seed, but its scheduled debut is looking to be a little late as September comes to a close.
While Apple doesn’t allow background processes to be running unless it’s tied to one of their in home developed Apps, they came to a compromise with developers by allowing notifications to be pushed to 3rd party Apps. Sure it simulates a constantly running App, prevents major battery drain and extends battery usage but Apple trailed off on that when they pulled it from the 2.1 Beta last month. It’s currently missing from the latest 2.2 Beta as well.
Fortunately, Apple is making some further refinements to the service as evidenced by this Macrumors thread. Pfish, a member on the forum shot Stevie J an email and in typical fashion his response is limited to less than a few sentences.
“From: Steve Jobs
Subject:Re: iPhone push notifications
Date: September 24, 2008 08:36:05 PM PDT
To: MeWe’re running a bit late. We want to get it 100% right the first time.
Steve
Sent from my iPhone“
On the other end, there is no concrete launch date now and this feature has yet to return the latest iPhone Beta seeds. While it may delay a much awaited feature, its better Apple perfects when it launches and doesn’t repeat the same mess caused by launching the iPhone 3G’s activation servers and MobileMe simultaneously. But it seems Apple is ramping down development of other iPhone features to fully stabilize the platform which is a great decision, to compete against Google’s Android and Windows Mobile platform, Apple will have to make the iPhone an attractive buying decision that sets itself apart not only in its feature set but how well it can be used without crashing or corrupting data.
Written by Tanner Godarzi on September 27th, 2008
Posted in: Opinion
1 Comment
This Week In Apple Stash: Uninteresting First Post on October 4th, 2008 3:31pm
[...] Apple Delays Push Notification Announced during their developer conference in June, push notification which would emulate background processing on the iPhone by maintaining a constant connection to Apple’s servers and sending updates to corresponding Apps has missed its September debut. We reported that it was pulled before firmware 2.1 was seeded to Beta testers but failed to make an appearance once the Firmware was deemed stable. A response sent from Stevie J credits the lack of Push Notification to ongoing development in order to nail it right the first time. [...]