MacOSCoders

Apple’s has announced a push notification service for the iPhone OS 3.0. It’ll maintain a persistent IP connection to the phone and let a 3rd party server ping Apple’s notification service in order to push out notifications to applications installed on iPhone OS 3.0, which can be in the form of badges, sounds or custom textual alerts.

According to Apple, the service will preserve battery life and maintain performance, not to mention work over WiFi or cellular. Look for it to roll out in September, with seeding to developers starting next month.

Push notifications —also known as remote notifications—let users learn when applications on their iPhone  and iPod Touch devices have data waiting for them on their servers. When a device receives a notification for an application ,it notifies the user through an alert message, a distinctive sound, or a number badging the application(or some combination of these). The user may then launch the
application, which then downloads the data from its server, which is also known as its provider. Introduced  in iPhoneOS3.0, push notifications serve the same purpose that a background application would on a  desktop computer.(As you may know,background applications are not allowed on these hand held devices.)