MIA: iPhone Background Push Notifications
Yet again, there was something glaringly missing from Apple’s Macworld keynote Tuesdsay morning: any mention of background push notifications for the iPhone. Background notification push services would allow any application to push a notification to an iPhone in the form of a badged icon or pop-up, adding great utility to social network applications, IM clients, and others.
If you remember, Apple announced this functionality on June 9, 2008. At that time they said it would be ready for a September release. September came, and with it a notification-less firmware 2.1. Firmware 2.2 was released in November with the feature missing as well.
So where is it then? According to a late July post from CrunchGear, a “handful of developers” had access to the push notification service. However, the accuracy of their report may be disputed by the fact that they also claimed that the service “will surely be pushed out when iPhone OS 2.1 rolls out.” Even without the push notification service in place iPhone App development isn’t exactly struggling.
Hopefully Apple is just making sure this launch goes better than the MobileMe launch in July. It’s quite possible that in a month or two Apple will release a new firmware with push notifications. Until then, we wait.
