When the iPhone development kit was announced, developers were rightly upset that only Apple’s native apps could run in the background. The solution offered was a push notification system that would pop up an alert, like when you get a text message, any time the app wants to get the user’s attention. This seems to be a reasonable compromise. Music apps can’t play in the background, run tracking apps can’t do their deal in the background, but that’s OK. For 80% of apps, this would be awesome. If we had it.
Dan Moren over at MacWorld has a piece on why it may still be a ways off, if we ever see push at all. His take is that it is very hard to do right (especially with launching MobileMe and the new-at-the-time iPhone 3G), and there is no great cry from the users to have push notification, even though it was promised to us five months ago.
My take is that yes, Apple committed to more than they could do, but the app store was so much more of a success than they planned for they couldn’t scale the push system to match it. Push notification is a victim of the app store’s success. If the app store was a moderate success it still probably would have been delayed, but we would have seen it by now. I for one couldn’t be happier.