Japan struggles with earthquakes as much as any country on earth and has an extensive network of sophisticated seismological sensors distributed around the country to try to detect big ones on the way. With the push of a slider (screenshot below), iOS5 users in Japan will be able to receive push notifications from those government sensors automatically (though probably via the mobile carriers). This could be what the future looks like, at least in part.

The earthquake alerts in the Japanese version of iOS5 is "a natural extension of notifications," says Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship, a leading provider of push notifications and analytics as a service and in-app sales infrastructure. "The fact that Apple is doing it at the OS layer is just plain cool and forward looking," Kveton says.

"We see this today with SMS, but network limitations make it hard to send the most effective notifications. SMS gets you reach but push notifications could drive you to a page that shows evacuation routes from your current location, etc. It's part of the inevitable shift to smartphones and the impact that's going to have on everything we do."

Rich, location-aware, real-time mobile push notifications when sensor networks detect activity that crosses a certain threshold could be offered in all kinds of settings: when traffic down the road gets jammed, when weather alerts are available, etc.

65% of kids in grade-school today may grow up to do work that hasn't been invented yet, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition's director said this Summer. In other words - there could be lots of uses cases in the future for sensors plus push notifications that we can't even imagine yet. Baked into the OS and built on real-time public data? Why not?

The company's new Push Composer is a simple web-based publishing platform for publishing messages that will be delivered to app users' iOS, Android or BlackBerry screens. Messages can be scheduled ahead of time and delivered to groups of users segmented by a variety of tags. The second new feature, UA Reports, displays daily metrics about notification open rates by time of day. With nearly 10 million notifications sent each day, Urban Airship says it intends to offer mobile marketing benchmarks, best practices for maximizing engagement through push and more data-centric insights in the near future.

An Unusual Company

We first wrote about Urban Airship eighteen months ago, when the then tiny startup unveiled its plans to act as a technology middle-man for app developers interested in outsourcing the infrastructure required to take advantage of the new push notifications and in-app purchasing on the iPhone. The company was founded by a scrappy group of engineers with a bizzarre story: their previous employer collapsed overnight, offering company computers in lieu of final checks, they built and sold an online bacon delivery website and a number of them were fortunate enough to receive unemployment payments for bootstrapping entrepreneurs under an innovative program from the state of Oregon.

Then they built Urban Airship. Led by serial innovator Scott Kveton, the company started landing customers fast and furious.

Fast forward to today and the now venture-backed startup says it has more than 7500 customers, using the company's services in almost 16,000 different apps, and adds an average of 43 new customers each day. In addition to push and in-app sales, the company was powering some of the first experiments with iOS content subscription. Urban Airship's list of customers is long and interesting, from Target to the Guardian, Warner Brothers, the Vancouver Canucks and Groupon. That's right - this little startup powers the push notifications for the fastest growing tech company in history. Say what you will about Groupon (I'm no fan) but that's impressive.

As we discussed in depth when it was revealed that push notifications were coming to the Twitter iPhone app, push enables new forms of interaction with mobile apps. Beyond increasing user engagement, push offers users opportunities to interact with apps in ways that are real-time, synchronous and rich with flow. The interruptive nature of push allows for finer-tuned prioritization of certain messages from certain sources. Push is a big deal, and Urban Airship makes it easy and systematic for app developers to implement it.

From its humble beginnings, the startup has now grown to 25 employees, has taken over a spacious office in Portland, Oregon and is quickly hiring many of the most cutting edge engineers, designers and sales people in that tech-rich town. The building now houses a number of mobile startups, including former Twitter engineer Alex Payne's forthcoming BankSimple. A publicly available mobile device testing lab is in the works as well, gathering devices from manufacturers around the world for anyone to come and test their apps on.

Moving Beyond Speaking to Geeks

Urban Airship says that companies come to it to save time and money on deploying push notifications, but there's far more than can be done once the customers are in the door. The startup is building new features quickly - some go over well (like RSS to push) and others have been slower to gain adoption, like the feature the company calls "rich media push."

The two features the company is releasing today speak to a new audience, though. While the legacy product is ultimately an API play, the new features adress the needs of marketing organizations. Both features are being tested with existing customers but will be made generally available once that testing is complete.

The new Push Composer is like a little blogging platform, or a Twitter client, but for writing Push Notifications. An attractive UI allows anyone to compose short messages, schedule them for delivery and segment the audience based on tags that users may have opted-into or that a mobile app provider applied to people themselves. For example: one group of recipients might like the Portland Trailblazers, another group may be people who have opened a push notification within the previous 24 hours. Tagged groups can be whatever you like. Click send and boom, the message will be sent and received in seconds.

At launch the Composer does not allow users to determine what screen in an app gets opened when a notification is viewed, but the company says that may be offered in the future. Right now when recipients view a notification, the app simply opens up its front page.

Even more interesting are the new UA Reports. At first the reports are simple. They just track app opens, time in app, and push volume over time.

In time, Urban Airship hopes to see what kinds of data their customers want and to offer a wide variety of information based on that data it collects, cross referenced with other data sources. The company says it believes that app developers will eventually make decisions based on the data the reports deliver: what kinds of notifications get the most response? What kinds of features are users best alerted to by push? Which features or content types should be more prominent in the experience of the app?

The company says, for example, that one of its magazine customers found that push notifications and icon badges for its mobile apps were being opened more often at 9 PM than at any other time of the day. In response, the magazine now regularly pushes new content and notifications around 8:30 to prime the pump for evening readers.

Push notifications are great for keeping users engaged with apps, but some mobile devices handle them better than others. On iOS they are frankly terrible - though rumors are flying that drastic improvements may be forthcoming.

Will putting push composition in the hands of marketers lead to notification overload, a declining user experience and consumer backlash? That seems like one of the risks, but one that Urban Airship hopes to tackle with data-based education about best practices. The company says it has one full time engineer dedicated to metrics right now, but does not offer any formal training or guidelines in pushing just right instead of too much.

"2011 is the year that mobile apps need to prove their value," says Urban Airship's Jason Glaspey in the company's announcement today. "With thousands of apps fighting for consumer attention and an average app lifespan of one month or less, developers and marketers need powerful tools."

With a full-speed-ahead attitude and plenty of momentum, Urban Airship will now try to provide just that kind of tools. Hopefully the data analysis the company shares with its customers will help keep trigger-happy push composers in check and not lead to an overwhelming flood of notifications. Time will tell. It looks like this new mode of communication is about to become easier and smarter than ever before.

What does that mean? It depends on how exactly the company lets users manage and receive their notifications, but it's not too early to start thinking about how push could change the Twitter experience. We asked a number of experts in the field of User Experience design what they thought about Twitter push notifications and several of them predicted it will be a game-changer for mainstream users.

Let's look past the risk of information overload for a moment, though, and assume that Twitter implements the feature well. What might that mean?

Right: screenshot captured by Nick Starr.

For me, getting replies and direct messages sent to me by push notification (I've been using Notifo) has been really nice. Twitter can be both synchronous (a real-time exchange) and asynchronous (I'll see your posts when I get around to it) but the addition of push notifications brings the personal communication of replies and direct messages firmly into the synchronous experience, even when I'm not at my computer or looking at a mobile app. It really adds to the flow of using Twitter. The asynchronous part of Twitter is most suited to non-personal messages broadcast by the people I'm following; I'd like the messages intended for me personally right away, please.

That's my take on it, here's what some more UX pros have to say.

Push as SMS Replacement

Cindy Alvarez, author of the San Francisco-based blog The Experience is the Product, thinks push notifications could supplant SMS and win some new users to Twitter:

The non-Twitter-users I know say, 'If you want a reply, you text or email [a recipient]; if you don't need a reply you post to Facebook, what is Twitter good for?' Bringing a more SMS-like experience to the desktop (where you don't incur $0.05 per text charges) might win over a different audience.

Twitter and SMS coming together again, just like the product's creators originally envisioned? That could lead to some truly far-out use-cases, too.

"[Push notifications] really start to blur the lines between what we traditionally think of as a Twitter client and SMS," says Dwayne King, User Experience Strategist at Portland, Oregon design firm Pinpoint Logic.

"Not knowing for sure what options they'll open up for push, it could expand beyond the bounds of what something like SMS could do. Where SMS requires some sort of pre-existing relationship between the texters, Twitter and push via hash tags or geographic location opens up a new avenue for meet-ups, flash mobs and such."

Bringing Celeb-Tracking Mainstream Users Back to the Good Old Days of Twitter

The most compelling take on the User Experience implications of Twitter push notifications may come from Aviel Ginzburg, UX guy at Seattle-based Untitled Startup, makers of Twitter bulk-conversation analysis tool RowFeeder. Ginzburg thinks that the addition of push notification tools could help make mainstream users, who have been introduced to Twitter as a way to passively consume updates from celebrities, aware of the service's incredible potential as a communication tool.

"Those of us who have been using Twitter since the days that it was largely (entirely) text messaging driven perceive Twitter much differently than mainstream users.

"The way that the site has been restructured in the past several months including the new search, celebrity, and brand focus, categories, featured tweets, promotions, etc have drawn in the mainstream in such a way that they aren't perceiving Twitter in the way that the early adopters do - as a real-time communication platform..." -Aviel Ginzburg

"Two days ago I was having coffee with a friend of mine, who has been on Twitter for a little over a year (tweets everyday, DMs, @replies people, and even owns an iphone w/Twitter for iPhone) and as my phone beeped over and over again, she asked me if something was wrong. I said no, I just get my DMs text messaged to my phone. Her response was, 'you can do that?!'

"She has been using Twitter like people use Facebook, as a way to consume (mainly) and share content in a 'on your own time' fashion. When she uses Twitter, she really uses it, but in controlled bursts when she is physically engaging.

"The way that the site has been restructured in the past several months including the new search, celebrity, and brand focus, categories, featured tweets, promotions, etc have drawn in the mainstream in such a way that they aren't perceiving Twitter in the way that the early adopters do - as a real-time communication platform that will one day replace text messaging, email, and even phone calls. Just look at the Twitter homepage... it's a text media consumption site.

"With the announcement of push notifications, they're bring the messaging platform core value proposition back to the forefront, and pushing the mainstream, who joined Twitter for entirely different reasons, to experience Twitter in the same way us early adopters do -- as a real-time communication channel that you never disconnect from. The concern of course is: have these users really signed-up for entering a service where the are expected to be available and engaged at all times?

"It may seem like a small and logical update (cut out the text messaging middle-man), but really, Twitter is going to be dramatically changing the way its mainstreams users experience and use Twitter."

What do you think the implications of push notifications in Twitter's own mobile applications will be? Are you looking forward to it? Do you think it's something only power-users are really interested in? Do you think it will change peoples' SMS habits?

There's no ability to set rules, to limit notifications to just emails from contacts, or anything. Just push notifications. For calendar that might make sense, but I'm already getting SMS messages ten minutes before my calendar events. A push notification is a beautiful thing, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense anymore in this context.

See also Boxcar, probably a better choice.

While some early testers of the Waveboard app complained that it didn't do anything more than what the iPhone optimized website already offered, the next release of Waveboard may have those naysayers changing their mind. Waveboard 2.0 has a few new features, but the one that will grab everyone's attention is its ability to offer "push" notifications on the iPhone.

Quick Inbox

One of the new features of Waveboard 2.0 is something called the "Quick Inbox" view. Since Google Wave loads a little slowly on the iPhone - something developer Dirk Holtwick says is out of his hands - he's come up with a workaround for a speedier launch. The new "quick inbox" feature offers a fast-loading overview that displays the waves that have changed, as you can see in the following video:

Push Notifications

Even more exciting, perhaps, is the push notifications feature. In addition to displaying a badge on the app's icon showing the number of new waves, the push notifications feature will tap into the iPhone's ability to display pop-up alerts on your device. As new text is entered into a wave, the iPhone will display the additional text in a push notification message:

Of course, depending on the number of waves you're involved in and how heavily they're used, this feature could easily become an annoyance. Unfortunately, Google offers few control mechanisms for managing the waves you belong to at the moment - something that could lead to serious information overload for Wave users. For example, anyone can add you to a wave - even without your permission. This can lead to an inbox crowded with waves that you don't really care about following. For some, this feature is a key selling point for Wave, but for others it's just a chaos-inducing mess. That may change in future, though, when Google implements the "whitelisting" feature, which will allow users to create an approved list of fellow wavers, and only people on that list will be able to contact you.

There's no word yet on if or how you'll be able to manage the new push notifications feature in the app's settings. If there were configuration options that let you exclude some waves (like public ones, for example), then it would be even more useful.

In any event, the app will now have some value-added features that make it worth the $0.99. Stay tuned to the GetWaveboard blog in the coming days for more details on the new features and how they work.

Hide Your Data Behind a Passcode

Overall, this update brings Mint's iPhone app in line with the company's regular web service. Having access to the budgeting features is a nice addition, as is the ability to edit transactions right on the phone. The most important update, however, is the added layer of security that the application-level passcode now brings. Carrying access to all this financial data around on a phone will definitely make a lot of potential users feel queasy about using the app. This extra level of protection, however, should give users enough peace of mind to give the app another try.

One neat aspect about the RSS alerts from Notifications is that the service uses Superfeedr as its backend to power this feature. Superfeedr, which supports the PubSubHubbub standard, guarantees developers that it will send out notifications about a new blog post within 15 minutes. That's not exactly 'real time,' but close enough for most purposes and during our tests, alerts generally arrived within a few minutes. The Superfeedr blog also features a short step-by-step guide that explains how to add new feeds to your Notifications setup.

If you own a blog, you can also easily add a Notifications badge to your blog that allows your readers to add your blog to their notifications within seconds.

Email

The developers are currently focused on supporting Gmail in the app and your mileage with other email services may vary. To make this work, all you have to do is forward the messages you want to get notifications about (Twitter DMs, Facebook messages, Google Voice SMS etc.) to a personal appnotifications.com email address the service will provide you with when you sign up. Facebook notifications, by the way, will automatically start the Facebook app and Google Voice text messages will open up in the Google Voice web interface in Safari.

Twitter

Twitter notifications are keyword-based. In order to see mentions of your own name, for example, you just have to add your Twitter handle to the search terms on the service's website. In order to receive notifications of direct messages, you will have to use Notifications mail notifications feature and set up a filter that forwards all DMs to your personal appnotifications.com email address.

Verdict

Of course, all these notifications could easily overwhelm even the most dedicated information junkie, so some restraint is definitely in order. Thankfully, the app also includes the ability to set a quiet time, so that you won't be disturbed by new notifications in the middle of the night.

Typically, we experienced a delay of less than 3 seconds before we received a notification, which is better than most push notification apps we've seen lately.

Overall, the combination of Twitter, RSS, and email notifications allows you to receive push notifications from a very wide range of services and allows for a great deal of flexibility. It does take some time to set the service up, though, as you have to set up filters in your email, for example. Most of the setup happens on the service's website, though, which makes things pretty easy. If you need to get push notifications fast and from a wide variety of services, Notifications is the way to go right now and the hassle of setting it up is more than worth the effort.

To Get the Most Out of the App, Set Up a New Gmail Account

It is important to note that while the app is extremely easy to use, it is also somewhat limited. You can't, for example, set up filters so that only certain emails will be pushed to the phone.

To bypass this limitation, we recommend that you set up an additional Gmail account and forward all the messages you want to be pushed to the iPhone to this account. This way, you can use Gmail's own filters to manage which messages you want to be notified of. As the app itself doesn't actually take you to the email client and works completely independent of the email accounts you have set up on your phone, it really doesn't matter which email account it checks.

Limitations: Only One Account, No Quiet Time

The app also supports only one email account, making it even more of a necessity to open up a separate email account just for push notifications.

Sadly, the developers didn't include a 'quiet time' setting, so messages will be pushed to the phone at all times.

Of course, Apple should simply include these notifications in the iPhone by default. However, for the time being, GPush is the best alternative to built-in email notifications, and given that it costs only $0.99, it's hard to say no to such a useful application that will surely be updated with new features over time.

At first, you might dismiss this problem since it only affects a small subset of users, but Balogh brings up an important question: "what should the developers do?" People who have purchased his application are now angry that it doesn't work, yet there's nothing he can do to help them.

A few weeks ago, Apple released their updated mobile OS, the iPhone OS 3.0, which included support for Push notifications among many other things. The two available NotifyMe applications were configured to use the new technology in both the free and paid versions. With these applications, users can receive push messages that remind them of items on their to-do list that need their attention.

Almost immediately after the company released the apps to the iTunes App Store, the support requests began rolling in. Balogh quickly realized there was a problem. Around 80% of the requests were from users who had installed NotifyMe on an unlocked phone. The users were complaining that the app either didn't work reliably or didn't work at all. Unfortunately, there was nothing Balogh or his co-developer Pavel Serbajlo could do to fix the situation.

Says Balogh, the problem involves the Push Notification service:

"...Every Push application has to request the unique token from the Apple's APNS servers to identify the device it's running on. Thanks to that token, APNS servers always know which device is yours. The token can be understood as an IP address -- the server has to know where to send the notification and for which application. APNS can also change your token regularly for higher reliability, so it's critical that the application requests the token again on every start (or when enabling the Push feature) to replace the old one if new token is forced by APNS.

On any unlocked iPhone, the application requesting the token is stuck. APNS does not provide any response at all and the application can either cancel the request completely by automatic timeout or let user wait with the progress bar forever. Either way, the user will never receive any Push message, because APNS has not provided the token."

In other words, if you're running an unlocked phone, you can forget about Push.

What Should Developers Do?

It may be easy for iPhone owners who haven't hacked their device to scoff at this issue: "Well, that's what you get for monkeying around with the firmware!" But the matter is not that simple.

Developers will have to determine how they're going to proceed now that they're aware of this limitation. Should they try to support the hacked phones? Should they just place a warning message in their app's description in the iTunes App Store? Should they ignore the problem (like Apple is doing)? Should they refund the money for the purchases?

Even worse, many of the unsatisfied customers are leaving poor, 1-star reviews when rating the application since they're unhappy it wasn't working for them. That seems incredibly unfair to the developer who has created a perfectly good application that works within the confines put forth by Apple. Yet now, new potential customers - including those content with their unmodified phones - will see these negative reviews and likely choose not to purchase, potentially overlooking great applications that would have worked just fine for them.

Apple's Involvement: Zip, Zero, Nada

Apple has every right to ignore this situation, we suppose, and that's exactly what they're doing. After all, the issue affects only a small community of hackers who have modified their phones. Or does it?

Does Apple have any responsibility to communicate this limitation to the developer community so they're not caught off-guard as Balogh was? After all, it's the developers who have to deal with the fallout - the overwhelming support requests, the unhappy customers, the bad reviews, etc.

At the very least, Apple could configure their APNS (push) servers to return an error message of some sort to let the developers know what caused the connection to fail, suggests Balogh. That way, the developers could at least plan to put a warning message in their app's description to cover themselves against these sorts of complaints.

Does that seem like a fair request? What do you think either Apple or the developer community should do regarding this issue?

It's important to note that Boxcar is not a fully-featured Twitter client. While you can reply to direct messages right from the app, it will actually open up your favorite Twitter client (you can currently choose between Tweetie and Twitterific) in order to open up replies. In the next version, which has already been submitted to Apple, Boxcar will also give you a choice to handle your direct messages in another Twitter client as well. This new version will also support multiple Twitter accounts.

OAuth Support

One nice aspect of Boxcar is that it allows you to sign in to your Twitter account using Twitter's OAuth implementation, which means that you won't have to give your Twitter name and password to yet another company.

Of course, Boxcar's 5-minute delay is still not quite the instant push that some users would like to see, but chances are that we will see this in the near future. At that point, Twitter could become a real alternative to sending text messages to your friends (assuming your friends are on Twitter and have a phone that supports push messages, of course).

We should also note that IM+ (iTunes link), which is mostly an IM app, but also supports Twitter, can also send push notifications when you receive direct messages and @replies. If the IM functionality isn't of interest to you, however, or if you don't want to switch away from Tweetie or Twitterific, Boxcar is probably a better solution at this time.

Boxcar as an Infrastructure Service

Overall, we think Boxcar is a very interesting solution, and at $2.99, it is also a dollar cheaper than iTwitter. We especially like the fact that, at least at this point, Boxcar is basically providing an infrastructure service and allows you to continue to use your favorite Twitter apps just like you used to.

Despite the number of iPhone Twitter applications out there, most users have narrowed down the list of clients they use on a regular basis to one or two of the most popular apps like Tweetie, Tweetdeck, Twitterfon, Twitterific, Twinkle, Twittelator, Tweetsville, or something else entirely. Since these clients already have notoriety and a solid user base, we expected to see one of them emerge as the first Twitter client to introduce "push" technology. Imagine our surprise then when another application, a newcomer called iTwitter, beat out all the rest to achieve this claim to fame.

Having just launched yesterday in the iTunes App Store, iTwitter is a robust Twitter application which offers all the features you would expect including access to your friends' timeline, direct messages, mentions (@ replies), favorites, following and follower lists, and a compose screen. Plus, it also throws in several extra features that may put it one notch above your current favorite app like its ability to display nearby tweets, integration with TwitPic (including an inline viewer), a fast re-tweet option, a landscape keyboard, custom searches and the ability to save them, and conversational threaded tweets.

Here Comes Pushed Tweets!

However, the feature which everyone cares about is not currently listed in the app's description on its iTunes page: PUSH. But a few hours ago, the app's dev team tweeted the big news: "iTwitter push notification is working perfectly now, enjoy it guys!"

The pushed messages arrive as pop-up messages on your homescreen, just like they do in other push-enabled applications like instant messaging clients Beejive and IM+. You can choose to "close" the notification message or you can tap "view" to launch iTwitter and view the tweet.

Unfortunately, there is a drawback to the way iTwitter implements the push technology. It pushes all mentions and direct messages...but only if the person sending them is using iTwitter, too. Sigh. So close, yet so far. We don't know why they would implement such a serious restriction and it is quite the disappointment. We guess the only way to work around this issue is to convince all our friends to ditch their current app and start using iTwitter instead.

At the moment, iTwitter is free, but if it remains the only available push client for too long, it wouldn't be a surprise if they started charging. Better grab it now just in case!

Update: As one commenter noted below, iTwitter isn't technically the first app to implement push Twitter messages - IM+ is. However, IM+ is more well-known as an instant messaging client, not as a standalone Twitter client. iTwitter is the first Twitter-only client to do push, an important distinction since many people prefer using a dedicated app with a lot more features.

We got a chance to test the app out for the last few weeks, and the app does indeed make great use of the iPhone's ability to receive push notifications. This finally makes third-party calendars on the iPhone useful, and reQall is one of the first calendar/to-do list apps to make really good use of this feature.

One of reQall's best features is that it can turn voice memos and free-style notes like "meeting with Marshall at 2pm on Friday" into formatted text and enter these as appointments into your reQall calendar. The voice transcriptions were generally spot-on.

The big difference with the old version of reQall is that you will now actually get an alert pushed to the phone that reminds you of that appointment you just dictated into your phone. Before, if you used the free version, you had to open up the app, and what's the chance of a user actually doing that?

In the pro version, reQall already sent out SMS alerts, but now, even the free version of the app can send out push notifications. We have seen quite a few IM apps that used push well, but this is the first time that we have encountered an application that makes really good use of push notifications, but isn't an IM app.

Correction: reQall just told us that the free version will not support push notifications.

Locations

One of the apps' coolest features (though restricted to the pro version) is that you can also assign locations to tasks. Sadly, though, because developers can't wake up apps remotely and get a user's location without the app running, the app still has to be running for this feature to work well. You can, however, bring up a map and see nearby places that also have reminders attached to them.

The pro version of ReQall also nicely integrates with your contacts, which allows you to easily make calls or send emails right from your list of reminders.

Pro Version

To get the most out of reQall, however, you really need a paid account. For $2.99 a month, which is not a major expense, you also get great features like easier voice memo recording by simply holding the phone to your ear (similar to how the Google Mobile app works on the iPhone), reminders by SMS, and access to a more fully-featured "memory jogger' function, which tries to remind you of items that you might just have forgotten otherwise. For professional users, the integration with Outlook is probably also another must-have feature that is only available in the pro version.

The exact differences are a bit complicated, but reQall provides its users with a nice table that lists all the differences.

Even the free version provides great features, and now that the app's pro version supports push notifications, it can finally live up to its promise.

BeeJive, for example, is a great IM app - and so are eBuddy (iTunes link) and IM+ with Push (iTunes link), two other push-enabled IM apps that were released in the last few days. These apps are intuitive, connect to most popular IM networks, and work just as advertised. But when it comes to push notifications, there are just too many little things that are holding these apps back.

By default, BeeJive, for example, will log you out of your account after just 20 minutes. So once you have finished a chat session, you will just be offline again and no new messages will be pushed to your phone. You can push this timeout limit up to 24 hours, but this setting is buried at the bottom of BeeJive's long list of options. The eBuddy IM app doesn't even have this option and just automatically logs you out after 30 minutes.

There are probably good technical reasons for this, but this behavior just isn't what we expected when we first heard about push notifications.

News Updates are Nice, but What About Customization?

While the AP Mobile app (iTunes link) does push out news updates regularly, it is also a bit of a letdown. There is, for example, no way to customize when you want to get alerts and which alerts you want to get. You can't just subscribe to tech news, for example, or updates about the latest celebrity deaths.

Still no Twitter Apps with Push

We are also still waiting for the first Twitter apps that support push (at least for replies and direct messages), better calendar apps (Remember Milk is the only one in the App Store so far, and it requires a pro account), apps that can push out alerts when an RSS feed updates or when new email arrives, or apps that are simply innovative and beyond our current exepctations.

Maybe Push Just Isn't the Solution?

While getting the current updates is nice, compared to having to open the app and see what is new, there is so much more that could be done with this technology. But for the time being, either Apple is holding back the most interesting apps, or developers just aren't able to use it in really innovative ideas.

We have talked to a number of companies that are producing geo-aware apps, for example. But because these developers aren't able to remotely wake up an app and pull in data about your current location, there really isn't much that they can do with push notifications at this point.

If only the phone could also run cron jobs, for example. Then that could start an application at regular intervals, in addition to push notifications, and developers could do so much more with this technology.

Of course, we are still in the early days of push on the iPhone, but so far, we have been quite disappointed with the current crop of apps. Hopefully, this will only be a stopgap solution anyway, and by the time the next generation of iPhones comes around, Apple will just allow apps to run in the background.

We got a chance to test both apps and both work just as advertised. For the AIM app, for example, the delay between sending a message and a notification popping up on our phone was usually under five seconds and sometimes almost instantaneous. Push, by the way, is enabled both for the free AIM app, which features ads, and the $2.99 paid version which is ad-free. One problem we noticed, though (and the same goes for the Associated Press news app with push), was that clicking on 'view' in a pop-up notification only open the app, but didn't take us to the actual message. We almost wonder if this is something Apple's API doesn't support, as this seems to be common among the push apps we have seen so far.

BeejiveIM is a bit pricey at $9.99, and the price might go up to $15.99 later, so if you really want this app, which supports, Windows Live, AOL, Yahoo, Google Talk, Facebook, MySpace, ICQ, and the Jabber protocol, not is probably the time to buy it. The one IM protocol this app misses support for Skype chats, though we are hoping for IM+ with support for push notifications (iTunes link to the free version) to be allowed into the store in the next few days.

Finally!

We are very excited to see the first new batch of push notifications in the App Store, though we would still like Apple to make a few changes to the way the iPhone handles these messages (including the ability to set a 'quiet time' during which notification are ignored). However, as long as Apple doesn't allow applications to run in the background, push notifications are the best alternatives and we are looking forward to seeing what developers will do with this new feature.

So what's the reason for the delay? One iPhone application developer has his suspicions. He's discovered what appears to be an issue with Apple's Feedback service and is now questioning if this, and not the backlog of new app approvals, is what's causing the holdup.

Reports Dominik Balogh, developer of the soon to be push-enabled app NotifyMe, there might be problems in the Feedback service provided by Apple's APNS (aka "Push") servers. In a posting on the Macrumors forum, he wrote,

Until now, we have noticed only minor glitches in Feedback service running on APNS servers. These servers deliver Push messages to user's iPhone or iPod touch.

Feedback service alone is periodically checking whether target iPhone application(s) are still reachable. If the Feedback service finds out that the target Push application (special unique token used) is already uninstalled or the Push messages are not possible to deliver repeatedly for whichever reason, it automatically lists the token of that unique user as "invalid". Developer's servers has to disable that user's account temporarily to prevent unwanted resource hogging and wasted traffic on both sides. The token is marked as "valid" back again if the same user is interacting with affected Push application some time later (or new clean token is generated).

The main purpose is clear. 1) No trash 2) saved resources 3) saved processing power 4) saved traffic -- in case users are not reachable. Could be as many as hundreds of thousands.

This Feedback service is currently not responding to our servers in about 4% of cases according to our own logs. Everything else's running fine.

Quote:

2009-06-20 17:32:08 - Feedback check...
2009-06-20 18:32:10 - Feedback check...
2009-06-20 19:32:15 - Feedback check...
2009-06-20 20:32:16 - Authentication failed because the remote party has closed the transport stream.
2009-06-20 20:32:16 - Feedback check...
2009-06-20 21:32:18 - Feedback check...

If, indeed, there was an issue with the Feedback service, it makes sense that Apple would hold back on approving what will surely be some of the most-used applications taking advantage of the new OS's push capabilities. These apps will generate a huge load of traffic and processing power, so it's critical that Apple's service is working without a glitch before the updates are released.

Apple to Developers: Sorry for the Delay

Incidentally, Balogh recently received an email from Apple's iPhone Developer Program, apologizing for the delay. It reads:

Your application, NotifyMe 1.0, is requiring unexpected additional time for review. We apologize for the delay, and will update you with further status as soon as we are able.

Thank you for your patience.
Regards,
iPhone Developer Program
****************************

A couple of other developers are reporting receiving the same email. 

A Second Opinion: 50,000 Apps to Approve = Major Backlog

Of course, suspicions aside, it's also just as possible that Apple is simply dealing with an extremely large backlog of apps in need of approval. With 50,000 applications now in their ecosystem and a new OS to support, the number of app updates waiting for the green light is probably bigger than ever before. And Apple's never been too speedy when it comes to their mysterious approval process.

While this theory makes sense, we have to wonder: if Apple was experiencing glitches with their Push Service - glitches we've seen in the past with MobileMe, for example - would they ever admit it? It's doubtful. Unless someone from Apple HQ itself decided to leak what's really going on with the approval delays, we would probably never know...we could only suspect.