Apple iPhone’s Push Notifications For Apps: is it enough?

One limitation that currently holds back Apple’s iPhone is its one application at one time policy, whilst this does offer the best performance it does stop some functionality from being available. Handsets like the Palm Pre and BlackBerry do enable multitasking which allows them to run background processes if necessary.

Apple does understand the functionality that this policy can limit therefore iPhone OS 3.0 offers APNS (Apple Push Notification Service), this is a workaround to attempt to in effect let the OS seemingly carry out multiple tasks.

From what we can gather the functionality this offers is to enable vendors or organisations to send small encrypted packets to the iPhone in the background. The concept is quite hard to get your head around, the easiest way to explain it is that APNS allows direct communication to iPhone applications, therefore it is possible to add small notifications within apps to in effect push the data your way.

Myself I do not see how this workaround completely relates to multitasking however I do see that depending on how the service is used it could become a very useful automated notification tool that hopefully wont just be used for marketing, or worse abuse. Abuse seems almost impossible as Apple have locked-down a lot of exploitable paths.

Check a more detailed look into APNS disadvantages on InfoWorld.