Apple invites iPhone developers to test live push notifications
"Start testing your applications using the Apple Push Notification service today," the company said in an email blast to registered iPhone developers. "Log in to the iPhone Dev Center and review the Apple Push Notification Programming Guide and Getting Started video."
Apple explained that Team Agents can log in to the iPhone Developer Program Portal and proceed to the App ID section to perform the necessary steps needed for developers to enable and test applications using the new service.
Under development for nearly a year now, the push notifications service is Apple's alternative to allowing true background processes — which chew up system resources and rapidly drain battery life — on its iPhone and iPod touch handhelds.
Instead, the iPhone maker's approach calls for applications that can quit but continue to "listen" for data on a universal network channel capable of sending messages and other notifications. This frees up system resources while still permitting applications, such as instant message clients, to keep an ear out for incoming transmissions.
While previewing iPhone Software 3.0 last month, which will be the first version of the software to support the push service, iPhone software chief Scott Forstall said devices running rival mobile operating systems from RIM and Microsoft see standby time fall by 80 percent or more with background processes enabled.
In contrast, Apple's tests show its push notification system inflicts only a 23 percent hit on standby time when enabled. It will allow developers to push a handful of different notifications to users who request the updates, namely icon badges, text messages, and alert sounds.
Until today, live testing of the push notification service was believed to be restricted to an extremely small subset of developers. While seeding iPhone Software 3.0 beta 2 last week, Apple told developers that they could begin writing applications that make use of the service, but warned that access to test those applications live would be limited at first, gradually expanding to more developers over time.
In its email Thursday, Apple also encouraged developers to join the Apple Developer Forums to communicate with other developers using the Apple Push Notification service, reporting any issues they uncover using the Apple Bug Reporter tool.
67 Comments
It's good to see that things are moving forwards.
This is one of the features I am really excited about.
It's good to see that things are moving forwards.
Yes it is. This was the main reason I decided to install v3.0 Beta on my iPhone knowing that I couldn't ever go back to v2.x after doing it. There are some nice updates coming but Push Notifications are the most important to me. Now bring Beta 3 and release Meebo w/Push to the App Store.
Tick, tock ... I can't wait!
I guess it's too much to hope for at this point, but I really wish Apple could come up with some kind of unified notifications screen, assignable as a home screen (plus dock for primary apps). Maybe "above" the existing home screen? In practice that would work much like Android's pull-down notification screen, with docked icon badges working like the top bar alerts.
Using changes to the icon badge is cool, but pop-up notifications proliferating from multiple apps is not.