iPhone News Updated

September comes and goes with no iPhone push notifications

September comes and goes with no iPhone push notifications

I have a joke for you: how are iPhone applications and rap artists Salt-n-Pepa different? Answer: Salt-n-Pepa may be able to “Push It,” but iPhone applications can’t, thanks to Apple’s decision to leave push notifications out of the iPhone 2.1 release. Originally, senior vice president of iPhone software Scott Forstall said that the feature would be done by September, but now that it’s October, publications like Macworld are reminding Apple that it has missed the target date.

When developers discovered the missing feature in an August iPhone 2.1 beta, the consensus on the reason for the removal seemed to be that Apple just hadn’t perfected the feature enough to ship it. Of course, Apple hasn’t commented on the issue since then, so we’re still in the dark about the real reason. The 2.1 release contained a number of highly-anticipated fixes to iPhone 3G problems, so it’s possible that Apple didn’t want to devote much time to adding new features. The company may also have been afraid of bad PR if it added a major feature like push notifications, only for developers to discover bugs with the implementation.

Now that Apple has missed the September deadline, the big question is when push notifications will finally be released. Some have said that the recent beta release of the iPhone 2.2 firmware still doesn’t include the feature, but others have said that the push notifications have returned. Developers seem to be particularly mindful of the NDA this time around, so it will probably take another beta or two until the existence of push notifications (or lack thereof) is confirmed. Apple will have some serious explaining to do if it doesn’t come with the next release.

[Thanks: http://arstechnica.com]

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