Where the freck is Apple’s Push Notification Service?
At the most recent Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) – held in June of 2008 – Apple announced a solution that would act to solve the iPhone’s most bounding restriction: the inability to run background processes. On stage at Apple’s conference for developers, Scott Forstall – senior vice president of iPhone software at Apple – told the audience that they should expect this Push Notification Service (PNS) to be ready by September. It is now January 2009 – four months after scheduled arrival of the service. So where the freck is it?
Apple has been mum on the status of the PNS, not that this comes as a surprise. Apple is known for its sercrecy regarding unannonced products and services, going so far as to sue Mac rumors site ThinkSecret for correctly reporting the release of the Mac Mini prior to the 2005 MacWorld Keynote address.
It seems, however, that few outside of Apple actually notice the blatant absence of the service. For me personally, it is an absence that hinders my iPhone experience greatly. How so? Instant Messaging without the PNS on the iPhone is simply useless: there is nothing that notifies me of an incoming IM unless an IM application is running. Until discovering this and realizing that the PNS is nowhere to be found, I was planning on using IM in place of text messaging (SMS) – avoiding paying for the SMS costs: texting is just glorified IMing anyway. But the lack of incoming IM notifications has made me reconsider.
Has anybody heard what the status is with the Push Notification Service? Has anything come out of MacWorld 2009 to shed some light on the issue? I hope it is coming, but please, Apple, don’t keep my in the dark! Please…
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Posted in Apple, iPhone
8 comments to “Where the freck is Apple’s Push Notification Service?”
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8. January 2009 at 10:54 pm :
I reckon Apple is undertaking a major upgrade to the GUI so that not only can they get PUSH messaging working, but also multitasking so multiple programs can be open at once & copy – paste functionality.
They have to do something quickly – cos first it was android, now its Palm. And boy does Palm look good.
8. January 2009 at 10:56 pm :
I have heard that AT&T offered Apple a cut of their text messaging plan revenues in exchange for Apple delaying their introduction of uber-ichat and push messaging services which will kill iPhone text messages as we know them.
8. January 2009 at 11:33 pm :
@Steve: I wish they would allow background processes, but I don’t think the current iPhone hardware is up to spec for it: I don’t think there is enough power under the hood to run apps in the background AND to control all the phone-related features. I think if they began to do this with the current hardware, it will cause application errors, dropped calls, and memory overflows. That being said, it is certainly possible with future models that (should) have more power. Maybe they could use that much-talked-about NVidia mobile processor to allow for background processes. But they need to do release the Push Notification Service as promised (or at least give us an update about it).
Do they need to have background processes to do copy/paste?
@Mark: that’s interesting! I don’t know that it would kill SMS messaging, though: the people that know about IM would use it, but those who don’t know about IM won’t use it. However, people catch on very fast when something is free (or less expensive) and does the same thing (and better, as is the case with IMs). I hope Apple can take the side of the user instead of the money side in this situation, even though they are a corporation with a responsibility to its shareholders to make big bucks and increase share price. But now that they have promised the PNS, how about the user?
9. January 2009 at 6:29 am :
The iPhone is a crippled piece of shit for Mactards and fashion lemmings. My 2 year old Symbian phone runs Skype/Messenger client, call recorder, internet radio software in the background without any problem.
9. January 2009 at 8:53 am :
10 million people would beg to differ in that it’s not “a piece of shit”.
If it does, in fact, run all those background apps without any problem – like the just-announced Palm Pre is supposed to, then it’s good for competition: forcing Apple to re-think and improve the “no background apps” rule of the iPhone.
To each his own…
16. January 2009 at 6:39 pm :
As a software developer/computer scientist, I first hated the thought of not being able to run background services on iPhone. However, after further research and consideration, I support Apple’s decision to do so. Here’s why:
1. This decision is one of the main reasons the iPhone provides a faster, better looking, easier to use UI over other Smart Phones and is at the core of all inventions Apple. End User performance will always be paramount to Apple. This cannot be done if a bunch of third-party services are starving the CPU.
2. REGARDLESS of the power of any computing device, software bloat is always a risk when allowing third-party developers to run processes on iPhone over long periods of time. And, there are a LOT of BAD programmers out there to fuck up performance with bad hacks, memory leaking, cpu hogging code.
3. Pending a working Push Notification Service, which I am disappointed is not available yet, centralizing incoming notifications/messages will maximize iPhone’s performance and do the job of a service to:
a. Launch Programs given user’s “OK” to launch iPhone apps.
b. Notify iPhone users of events, messages, etc…
c. Take further pre-programmed actions.
If you know how to program, then you WILL NOT need to create a service. Services should not be used in a mobile environment anyways, unless absolutely needed.
Deliver Push Notification with these features Apple and I’m with you 100%. The rest of you criticizing this design should sit back and think about it for 5 minutes… or don’t and go back to fixing your Windows Vista machine.
19. January 2009 at 11:55 pm :
@MacInsight:
Love the comment, great job! I have a few things to reply:
1. Agreed 100%. It will be interesting how Palm did with the Pre, which runs background processes yet is the only smart phone “competitive” with the iPhone.
2. Agreed 100%.
3. It will be nice to see the Push Notification Service in action, whenever that might be. I, for one, am really interested in giving permission to launch an app through the PNS.
I have to wonder, though, whether Apple is planning on allowing background processes in future iPhone releases. Why? They’ve been either buying up (PA Semi) or otherwise partnering with mobile chip manufactures over the past year and a half. I can only imagine the purpose of all that is to release much more powerful processors for mobile devices such as the iPhone.
Alex
31. March 2009 at 4:19 pm :
[...] it certainly is an interesting solution. As time went on and the APNS wasn’t to be seen, I wondered what’s taken Apple so long to release it and whether Apple just forgot about it outright. [...]