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Did we forget push notifications on the iPhone?

Fezzy said:
seems like we might be getting push notifications in the next day or two!!!!!!

AOL say they are releasing AIM version 2 for iPhone very soon with push notifications.

This would need an iPhone firmware update right?

Link to video of AOL interview with TUAW/
Click to expand...
I hope so, but it sounds more like AOL will just let you stay signed in and they'll send you SMS if you want, but not the actual Apple push notifications. Sigh.
 
markgamber said:
My experience is that it's very hit-or-miss as to what actually works as a background process and for how long. Even if you jailbreak the phone, install Backgrounder and force an app to stay running (and it does actually run like that), the system will still blow it away if it needs memory for something else rather than telling you're low on memory and can't do what you just tried to do. If you're going to have to micromanage apps, memory and so on, you might as well cut the crap and get a phone with a real multitasking system like WinMo or Blackberry. I can appreciate Apple's concern with the phone getting slow, running out of memory and not wanting to force the user to have to care about that, but their "solution" is just as bad as the problem. Worse, actually, since they promised a half-assed solution last fall and haven't yet come through with that.

Just FYI, jailbreaking can't really hurt anything and if you restore it, you magically get your warranty back. I, personally, haven't read of anyone who actually killed their 3G by attempting to jailbreak it and if you can read, it's easy to do. But it's not a solution. The percentage of people who jailbreak is extremely low because there isn't much of a reason to do so and I don't think anyone is making a living selling apps that require you to jailbreak the phone to be of practical use.
Click to expand...

+1 . i tried backgrounder for chat apps like beejive/palringo etc and it does work as intended. but once you try to have an app in the background AND try to do some normal iphone stuff such as

phone call, check your mail, load up safari or run some music.

the phone will quickly run out of memory and force the app to close. push notification is the way to go. having push e-mail from beejive has been great, would love for it to just put a badge number on beejive icon instead though.
 
My reasons against push notifications are as follows:

1 - People who are not using push email at present are going to see a massive drop in battery life. Those of us that are will probably see a drop as well. One of the reasons toured for using Push Notifications in the first place was to conserve battery life. I can't see how running a service which is using my Internet connection 24/7 is going to use less battery than just letting me run my IM client in the background during the few hours a day I might actually want to use it.

2 - I have been a smartphone user for a great many years and have not noticed any massive reduction in battery life due to running apps in the background. My girlfriend runs Fring on her N95 24 hours a day and her battery lasts a day and a half, and is smaller in capacity to the iPhones.

3 - even when a notification arrives I still have to load the app to read the message or whatever. If I'm using Palringo the app loads in about 3-5 seconds and then takes upto a further 25 seconds to sign in to my MSN account. Every time I get a message I don't want to have to spend upto 30 seconds waiting to read it, and then get another one within moments of closing the app and have to start the process all over again. I want to switch to the app which is still running and still signed in.

4 - This push notification system is gonna cost money. Big big money! Money for Apple to impliment a massive server system to enable all of the millions of iPhone users across the world to be logged into it 24/7. Imagine the bandwidth! Imagine the strain on the networks!

5 - What is the incentive for the developer of a free app to support this service? Take Palringo as an example again. Their servers will still be responsible for running the app and keeping you signed in to all of your IM accounts. But now instead of having say 10% of the people who have downloaded their app signed in at one they will have everyone all the time. They'll have to spend a lot of money putting loads of new servers in to cope with the load, and to deal with the (probably) hundreds of thousands of Notifications they will have to send to Apple every minute for all users. Where's the money going to come from for all of this? From me and you! We may well be charged subscriptions for apps which were once free.

6 - 3G service provisioning is dependent on how many other users in the same cell area are using it. There may well be huge connection problems for everyone in 3G networks when this goes live.

7 - In the keynote when Push Notifications were announced Apple had a pop at Microsoft by showing a Windows Mobile device with the Task Manger app open. But they tried to make it seem more complicated than it actually is by switching to the processes view rather than the task view and saying you needed computer science skills to use it. This was a cheap trick. Although I'm no great fan of WinMo I have used it in the past and accept that it is an OS with power users in mind, however closing a task has nothing to so with manually closing any processes it may use. It's as simple as the task manager on any Windows or Apple machine. The real reason they won't impliment the task manager approach is that the iPhone has next to no free memory to run background apps because the OS is so memory intensive. But they wouldn't say that, instead looking to take a cheap shot at Microsoft.
 
redman042 said:
I agree they should dump the server notifications strategy altogether and just enable limited support for certain apps running in the background. Jailbreakers can already do this, and from what I've heard, it actually works quite good. Makes me want to jailbreak, but I have little free time in my life to muck around if I screw something up. I want full warranty coverage and I want updates as soon as they are released. So I stay legit.

Apple could allow background apps but set very strict criteria for what kinds of apps are allowed to have this feature, and how much the apps can do while they are running in the background.
Click to expand...

backgrounder is a great concept. too bad the iphones hardware is absolutely abysmal and can barely handle running more than one app anyway.

its useless. when you want to leave something like beejive or some radio streaming app playing in the background and then try to do something else, your programs just run out of memory and crashes.
 
Aurial said:
My reasons against push notifications are as follows:

1 - People who are not using push email at present are going to see a massive drop in battery life. Those of us that are will probably see a drop as well. One of the reasons toured for using Push Notifications in the first place was to conserve battery life. I can't see how running a service which is using my Internet connection 24/7 is going to use less battery than just letting me run my IM client in the background during the few hours a day I might actually want to use it.
Click to expand...

Push does not keep the iPhone connected to the internet 24/7. The iPhone is ALREADY connected to the internet 24/7. Push notifications will not use any more battery life than push email because the whole point of push is that the iPhone gets notified of new information, then it's downloaded... you seem to think the iPhone is constantly requesting new information by polling a server every few seconds.

Watch the video again where they talk about how push will work. What you're talking about is called "pull".
 
TheSpaz said:
Push does not keep the iPhone connected to the internet 24/7. The iPhone is ALREADY connected to the internet 24/7.
Click to expand...

No. It's only connected when it's transferring data, and the path disappears soon thereafter due to limited resources. That's why you get charged per byte count instead of by time as with a phone call.

Data is packet switched. Voice is circuit switched. This is a critical difference.

Push notifications will not use any more battery life than push email because the whole point of push is that the iPhone gets notified of new information, then it's downloaded... you seem to think the iPhone is constantly requesting new information by polling a server every few seconds.
Click to expand...

Not every few seconds, but certainly every thirty minutes (and often half that).

"Push" is more of a marketing term in this case, meaning notifications come quickly.

Unless SMS (or a patented method such as with RIM) is used as the alert mechanism, "push" involves a repeated set of transactions (tiny or large) between your phone and the servers.

This is because the network between you and the servers is not static. Your connection path will disappear if not used for X number of minutes. So usually the phone sends a request ping every 10-15 minutes. The server can respond to the request whenever it needs to within those minutes... thus acting like a push, even though it's technically a fancy pull.
 
kdarling said:
No. It's only connected when it's transferring data. That's why you get charged per byte count instead of by time as with a phone call.

Data is packet switched. Voice is circuit switched. This is a critical difference.



Not every few seconds, but certainly every thirty minutes (and often half that).

"Push" is more of a marketing term in this case, meaning notifications come quickly.

Unless SMS (or a patented method such as with RIM) is used as the alert mechanism, "push" involves a repeated set of transactions (tiny or large) between your phone and the servers.

This is because the network between you and the servers is not static. Your connection path will disappear if not used for X number of minutes. So usually the phone sends a request ping every 10-15 minutes. The server can respond to the request whenever it needs to within those minutes... thus looking like a push.
Click to expand...

So push is more like "pull"? I thought the point of push was so that instead of the iPhone requisition information, the information is sent to the iPhone the instant there is data to download. So with push email, I do not see any dip in battery performance... in fact, it seems even more efficient than Fetch (since fetch checks for downloads every 15 minutes and push only downloads as many times as there are new emails. So if you get 1 email in 1 day, push will be more efficient than checking every 15 minutes and coming up empty most of the time.)
 
TheSpaz said:
So push is more like "pull"?
Click to expand...

Yes, but unlike some pulls (aka fetch), the server doesn't have to respond right away. It just has to respond before the connection times out, even if just to say "nothing yet, buddy". This keeps the connection alive.

I thought the point of push was so that instead of the iPhone requisition information, the information is sent to the iPhone the instant there is data to download.
Click to expand...

That is correct. As soon as there is data, the server sends it down over a connection THAT IS KEPT ALIVE BY NULL TRANSACTIONS. (Sorry for caps, but that's the key.)

So with push email, I do not see any dip in battery performance...
Click to expand...

Some do, some don't. If the network path between you and the server times out every 30 minutes, then your phone only has to ping the server (or vice versa) every 29 minutes, and you use half the battery of a 15 minute timed fetch.

But if the path times out every 5 minutes, whoo boy, there goes the battery, with pings every 4 minutes. Which is much worse than a 15 minute timed fetch.

The primary point of push is to send data immediately. It is NOT designed necessarily to save battery.
 
It is true that push is a battery killer. I used to have push enabled on my iPhone with my work Exchange server and that would absolutely demolish my battery. Now I have it set to fetch every 15 minutes instead.

Hopefully when they implement the push notifications they'll give us the option to turn them off or give us fetch intervals for the notifications as well.
 
PoitNarf said:
It is true that push is a battery killer. I used to have push enabled on my iPhone with my work Exchange server and that would absolutely demolish my battery. Now I have it set to fetch every 15 minutes instead.

Hopefully when they implement the push notifications they'll give us the option to turn them off or give us fetch intervals for the notifications as well.
Click to expand...

Hmm. With my experience, my battery life is better with push instead of fetch.
 
TheSpaz said:
No. MobileMe only. What's the difference? <-- Not meant to sound smart-assy. Just curious.
Click to expand...

Not exactly sure what the differences in their push implementations may be (if any) but ask anyone using push with an Exchange account and they'll definitely say that it uses a lot more juice than fetch.
 
TheSpaz said:
Hmm. With my experience, my battery life is better with push instead of fetch.
Click to expand...

Whether push uses less battery than fetch, can be different for everyone. And even different for the same person in different locations.

You are tied to whatever is the least timeout in the path. If a router drops you every ten minutes, then the "push" software will respond by making more frequent pings.
 
kdarling said:
...This is because the network between you and the servers is not static. Your connection path will disappear if not used for X number of minutes. So usually the phone sends a request ping every 10-15 minutes. The server can respond to the request whenever it needs to within those minutes... thus acting like a push, even though it's technically a fancy pull.
Click to expand...

And my thinking here is that the iPhone will now have to ping two servers instead of one to keep the 'push' pathway open for both, hence a further decrease in battery life.
 
Aurial said:
And my thinking here is that the iPhone will now have to ping two servers instead of one to keep the 'push' pathway open for both, hence a further decrease in battery life.
Click to expand...

Yep. It was the first thing some of us thought of months ago.

So we can bet Apple thought of that too, and it's one reason for the delay: changing things so that both mail and application notifications use the same path.
 
Now-a-days everybody wanna talk like they got sumthin' ta say, but nothin' comes out when they move they lips, just a bunch of gibberish and mother---ka's act like they forgot about push

Parody of "Forgot About Dre" by Dr. Dre feat. Eminem
 
PoitNarf said:
Not exactly sure what the differences in their push implementations may be (if any) but ask anyone using push with an Exchange account and they'll definitely say that it uses a lot more juice than fetch.
Click to expand...

MobileMe uses an XMPP-based notification scheme. Exchange ActiveSync uses a long-lived HTTPS connection over which a proprietary XML format is sent.
 
kdarling said:
Yep. It was the first thing some of us thought of months ago.

So we can bet Apple thought of that too, and it's one reason for the delay: changing things so that both mail and application notifications use the same path.
Click to expand...

That may work fine if they combine it with MobileMe somehow, but there are a lot of us not on MobileMe. I'm on my own private exchange server so I can't see how they can combine those two. The link is between my server and my phone, nothing to do with Apple.
 
Aurial said:
That may work fine if they combine it with MobileMe somehow, but there are a lot of us not on MobileMe. I'm on my own private exchange server so I can't see how they can combine those two. The link is between my server and my phone, nothing to do with Apple.
Click to expand...

Ouch. Good point. Thanks.

Hmm. Unless Apple's trying to figure out a way for their notification servers to spoof your Exchange server, pretending to be your phone.

My head hurts. <grin> Glad I'm not the Apple person who told Jobs about this scheme.
 
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