Push Notification Coming To The iPhone

Apple looks set to step up a gear to tackle the issue of the iPhone only running one app at a time. Currently the iPhone doesn’t support background applications, which would mean that if you clicked on a web link sent over AIM, Safari would launch the page, and cause AIM to quit. One of the reasons for this was to conserve battery life, as applications left running in the background would use a significant amount of battery power. To give users an alternative to background applications, Apple plans to introduce a “Push Notification Service”. This new service would funnel all transmissions from developers’ servers through a central Apple server, which would then send the data to the iPhone through a single persistent and wall-managed background connection, thus eliminating the need to have applications running simultaneously. Apple has released a beta of this to a select group of developers, though it supposedly isn’t fully functional yet. Apple has another two months to meet their self-imposed deadline to provide Push Notification Service tools to its developer community.