Apple Opens Push Notifications to iPhone Developers for Testing

Today Apple starting sending out emails to many of its iPhone developers inviting them to start live testing the upcoming push notification service that will be part of iPhone software 3.0. Until today the push notification service, which Apple has been working on for over a year, was limited to a small subset of developers.

As a reminder, Apple’s push notification service comes in lieu of true background running applications, which the company says chew up far too much battery life to be resourceful. They claim that companies such as RIM and Microsoft that feature true background applications are sacrificing as much as 80% of idle battery time, whereas the push notification service will only consume 23% idle battery time.

Under the push notification service umbrella, third party applications on the iPhone will be able to listen for data on a network channel capable of sending and receiving messages even after the applications have been closed. This allows resources to be freed up while still having the ability to receive incoming data transmissions. For example, if I signed onto AIM but closed the application, AIM would cease running in active memory on the iPhone, but I would still be notified of any instant messages I received via the push notification service.

In the email sent out to developers, Apple instructed users to log in to the iPhone Dev Center and download the push notification programming guide and getting started video.