Apple announced way back in June 2008 that it would be introducing a push notification service for developers. Basically, your iPhone or iPod touch applications could get push updates without being open. Get a facebook message? New IM? All that gets pushed to your phone and it alerts you right away. That service was supposed to be unveiled in September 2008. We’re now still waiting, and it’s January 2009. What happened? Here’s my 2 cents:

Apple hasn’t publicly said what the deal is, though Steve Jobs supposedly emailed a user and said it was delayed to make it “100% right.” What does that mean, exactly?

Think about your iPhone now, and the way it handles (or tries to handle) notifications from applications. Imagine your phone is off or you ignore for a few hours during a normal business day. You look at it, and you get a slew of new messages. Your phone alerts you to Voicemail (rare as they are these days), Missed Calls, Emails, new Calendar entries, SMS, App Store updates, etc. That is a TON of apps to open (Phone, Email, Calendar, SMS, App Store). And, there’s no quick-and-easy way to see everything at once. Imagine you only have a couple emails, maybe one missed call, etc. You’re opening app after app after app just for a quick check. Or, you’re already deep in an app, and your phone dings to tell you that you have a new message. Guess what!?! Gotta quit that app and go open Mail. That’s not only annoying, it’s inefficient. Right now, with just Apple’s apps giving you updates, it’s simply a pain.

Now imagine if you throw 5 other apps in there all updating constantly. There could easily be 15 spots you have to check on your phone just because you didn’t look at it for a few hours. That’s not alright. The only attempt at some unified approach is a screen when you unlock the phone that shows who called/texted/left voicemail. Not good enough…at all. I think Apple knows this, and that’s why we have a delay. More on that in a second.

What have others done about the issue? The G1 has a great solution for notifications, offering a notifications drop-down page where all these are shown on one screen. The newly debuted Palm pre has a handy notifications screen too, addressing these issues. Everythingtreo.com posts a nice video of it here:

So, if Apple were simply making it so that apps could just get push notifications, we’d probably have a solution already. After all, they were well on their way to adding it, only 3 months out. I think Apple has another trick up their sleeve, and that’s to implement a whole notifications system with this updating, doing it, as Steve said, “100% right the first time.”

Is there any evidence of this? Certainly! Apple was granted a patent back in September detailing a system just like this, but in September, people though the push notifications still might come, new notifications system or not. AppleInsider details a recent patent from Apple. Usually Apple’s patents don’t mean an actual product, but this one’s timing, especially given the delay, makes sense. AppleInsider noted:

Such an implementation could become increasingly useful once Apple releases support for global push notifications that will allow third party applications to receive transmissions in the background or when the phone is in a locked state.

I agree, but instead of it being “increasingly useful,” I think it becomes mandatory with push notifications. And I think once push notifications arrive, we’ll see such a system. Apple’s proposed system is seen above from a filing to the US Patent Office covered by AppleInsider.

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