In search of Push

I'm just wondering since Steve Jobs announced this feature at WWDC during the iPhone 3G announcement if there's a class-action lawsuit coming. I mean, I'm sure there were people that bought this knowing that push was a part of the feature set, and now have been left wondering "What happened"? Does it not smell at least a little like a false advertising suit?

The push facility is needed - you definitely don't want 5 background apps polling their own servers. Apple's assessment of this is correct.

You do need background facility for -some- apps but this will always be bad for battery life. Just because other phones allow it doesn't make it right.

Actually push needs to leverage something more like SMS. J2ME (Java) phone apps have had a push API for years based on top of SMS custom port numbers, and it requires no connection to the server. The radio on the phone is always receiving these, so there is no difference to power consumption for apps that want to receive alerts.

All Apple need to do is provide a registry (called the Push Registry in J2ME!) that binds incoming custom SMS port numbers to specific URLs of apps on the phone. Then you could even have an SMS that could just bring up a web page - not just native apps. Eg BBC News could push to you when something big comes in.

See my blog post http://www.anyware.co.uk/2005/2008/07/18/iphone-20-firmware-the-good-the-bad-and-the-wtf/ points 5 to 7 for more explanations of this.

If apple is having such a problem with push why not leave it to the enduser to decide which app he/she wants to recieve push notifications. I know it's easier said then done. But my Idea would be to make an app for push and let it display all your apps with an off and on switch and from there allow the user to dicide which 1 or 2 apps they want to recieve push on. This is what they did with backgrounder and it's awesome.

The only reason why Apple would logically not have included such a crucial service in the iPhone at this phase is that they have realized that the push for background applications is going to play their hand and they will have to offer 'something' in order to not fall behind in the the tick-mark race. There are a LOT of devices coming out in the next 24 months and one place where those competitors are attacking is in the developer camps.

As Microsoft has shown - he who controls the developers, controls the market and Apple would be fools to continue to ignore the cries of developers. The other platforms coming out aren't behind enough in feature set.

The chatter about hardware usually includes something about additional cores or additional processors. To take just a wild guess, I'd say there could be a core dedicated to background processes so that each iPhone has it's own built in "push server" that continually runs. Apple's challenge is then to somehow construct the SDK to reconcile the differences in hardware between "push compatible" and non-compatible earlier models. The main goal would to ensure apps could run on any model iPhone so that there wouldn't be different tiers of apps in the App Store so that you don't have to buy the latest iPhone to use the newest app, thus more app sales for a larger, nonexclusive install base. A possible implementation would to have apps on older iPhones only check for notifications on startup when they have precedence on the hardware, while the newer multi-core iPhones could be using that background process core to constantly check multiple apps' notifications at some predetermined interval, regardless of whether the app is running up front. It could also be possible to have this background process be made into a stand alone app on earlier models that would stop everything and check all "background processes" at once, similar to a "Check for new mail" or in this case "Check for new notifications".

While this comment has gotten more elaborate than I had planned when I first started, keep in mind that I have no training in programming and am largely speaking out my ass.

Glad to know I'm not the only one who remembers this being announced...

Oh, btw, loved the puns! haha...

Why didn't anyone ask about this at MacWorld?

I thought the app IM plus had the push feature

I for one only bought the device knowing Push was coming....I emailed Jobs back in October and he told me they were still working out some wrinkles on it...

What a sucker I am falling for his 'promises/lies'.

I'm thinking about switching to the Palm Pre when it launches. The iPhone is a great device but it's not feature complete. Running apps in the background is a must have for every system these days. That and other things make me think about selling my iPhone and replacing it with a better one.