Hasta La Gadget!

Apple is finally testing the long-delayed push notifications promised back at the very beginnings of the App Store. The notifications are what will allow third-party applications to offer updates to their home-screen icons and display status messages without the actual application continuing to run in the background, something forbidden by Apple.

The problem has been that all the data has to go through Apple’s servers. Imagine — every single person that uses an instant messaging client, say, would have their updates piped through to Apple and then pushed to their iPhone. And that’s for every single message. If you remember the disastrous launch of Apple’s web-centric Mobile Me service, you’ll see the problem.

The test is going to be “large scale” according to an e-mail sent to iPhone developers. They can’t yet add push notification to their own apps, but instead can download a special pre-release version of the Associated Press application. If enough developers do this (and of course they will — developers are inveterate tweakers) then it should provide a good pressure-test of the system. The other advantage of using software developers to test things is that they know how to file proper bug reports.

This brings us one step closer to iPhone OS X 3.0, and hopefully a few moths later to the third iPhone itself.

Apple begins stress testing iPhone 3.0 push notifications [Apple Insider]

Image: TUAW