Apple Giving Up On the iPhone Push Notification Service?
During the World Wide Developers Conference in June 2008, along with announcing the availability of the iPhone 3G, Apple also announced a feature of the iPhone OS aptly dubbed the “Push Notification Service.” The iPhone would be “pushed” updates from third-party vendors with the intent of automatically updating data in their applications. The idea would be to alert users with a badge overlaying an app’s icon, custom sounds or even message dialogs.
The application of the Push Notification Service is limitless but some ideas are fairly obvious. One function I know many folks are anticipating is the ability for instant messaging applications to continue to receive updates in the background, even when the application is no longer running. As new instant messages arrive, an icon badge would overlay the application, incrementing each time a new event occurs.
But what happened to the Push Notification Service? Has Apple given up on this highly anticipated feature?
