iPhoneOS: Where is Push Notification?!

Posted on November 3rd, 2008. Written by Arron.

On June 9th, Apple Inc announced it had intentions to provide a viable solution to background processing on the iPhone and iPod touch. While taking a dig or two at Microsoft’s ‘Task Manager’ stating clearly that this wasn’t the way forward, WWDC08 also saw Apple announce it’s Push Notification Service. A solution which would save your battery, and keep a persistent connection to any applications which needed it. A service, which was promised, but is yet to be implemented …

Lets first get into what this service is meant to achieve in the long term. Currently, on Windows Mobile devices, you can run as many applications as you want at any one time. On the iPhone, it’s a different story. One of the drawbacks to the iPhone SDK, and iPhone developers in general is the ability to run two or more applications at one time. Sadly, I can’t see this changing anytime soon. However, one of the wants because of this drawback is the ability for application’s on iPhoneOS to alert you to status changes, while closed.

Now currently, when you exit an application on iPhoneOS, that’s it – No more data is passed to it, and it cannot interact with other applications on the system outside of it’s sandbox. Apple explained that they disabled the ability to run multiple applications at one time in the early stages of developing iPhoneOS, as it believed it would heavily impact battery life as well as pose risk to other applications through possible security flaws. We recently saw Zac White from Oklahoma University find and exploit a weakness in iPhoneOS, to provide a make-shift way of Copy and Pasting data from one application to another. Unfortunately Apple plugged this exploit in iPhone 2.1 explaining it “posed risk”.

So, recognising that in order for these devices to become popular in the enterprise, as well as the consumer market, it had to provide a solution … it did. Cue, The Push Notification Service. When Apple finally get round to launching this service, it will be fantastic. Basically, it will allow independent ‘dependent’ applications (for example, instant messaging clients) to alert you to new status updates, in one of three ways:

• Sound notifications

• Visual notifications (SMS Bubble Pop-up)

• Badge notifications

… even when the application is closed.

Now you might ask; How does Apple intend to provide updates and alerts to an application which is closed? Because closed application’s can’t run outside of their sandbox to provide these alerts, right? Normally, yes, but this is where the Push Notification Service comes in. Apple explained that the service would become a cloud. Developers could then build the API for the cloud into their application’s and back-end servers, and push status notifications up and through into the cloud. They would then keep a persistent connection to your device, and this would allow application’s like instant messaging clients to alert you to incoming messages without relying on SMS or E-mail services.

Now this is great, but all this was promised for the end of September. Not only have Apple missed the boat by not including this in 2.1, they’ve also not mentioned what the delay is. There has been no further details on this service. Have they scrapped it? Who knows. One thing is certain though, and that’s Apple are not saying a word about it.

When Apple seeded the early betas of 2.1 to devs, Push notification was said to be there. However, in beta 4, support for it had been stripped. So now the seeds are at v2.2, and apparently, according to current beta testers, the service is “No-where near ready.” – and that’s worrying. Lets not forget, this is not an end-user feature like for example, Maps.app. This is a service which Apple are providing to registered developers, and each application which is going to implement it, is going to have to add support for it, and that could take time. Once it’s out in the open, Developers need to build it into their back-end servers, and then submit a further version of their application to Apple, in order to support the new service.

I recently talked about the expected features of 2.2, and how it’s becoming a pretty major update for a point release, but still no mention of push notification? – Seriously Apple, if your settings deadlines to close to the wire, don’t. I’m not pushing for the service to be released early, I’d rather them take months and perfect it, but publicly announcing an ever vague release date of ‘Late’ September, and now being in November and still no sign, even after iPhone 2.1′s release? – It’s a bit unnerving. Then again, maybe they’ll surprise us. Will there be support for it in 2.2 though? – I highly doubt it.

Are you waiting for iPhoneOS to support push notification? Maybe this is one of the reasons you don’t yet have an iPhone? Let us know your views in the comments.