what is push notification service?

Question

hi, i want to know what push notification is? is it related to in App purchase?what it does? what are the advantages of it?

Answer 1

It will be really wise to google first. There are many documentations for this. Even wikipedia has it. And for more insight, you can always refer to the Iphone Reference Library.

Answer 2

Rather than having your device check to see if there are any new items at set intervals, the central host of updates will phone you when you have updates. This is the "push" described. When you've got something new, they tell you. You no longer need to "ask" for it. This benefits you in many ways, including the obvious saving of battery life and bandwidth usage.

Engadget blogged the announcement back in 2008 with the following description:

Apple's just announced a push notification service for the iPhone that it'll provide to all developers. It'll maintain a persistent IP connection to the phone and let a 3rd party server ping Apple's notification service in order to push out notifications your device, which can be in the form of badges, sounds or custom textual alerts. According to Apple, the service will preserve battery life and maintain performance, not to mention work over WiFi or cellular. Look for it to roll out in September, with seeding to developers starting next month.

Additionally, Wikipedia provides a nice rounded explanation too.

Answer 3

Push notifications can be used to send notifications to applications. In app purchases are a completely different thing.

Internally push notifications have been implemented so that the device keeps persistent connection to Apples servers and the servers will push data to the devices. Developers who want to use push notifications have to have their own server that pushes data to Apple's servers that will then forward the notifications to the devices.

The classic example of how to use push notifications is a chat application. When the chat application is closed, it can show a badge on the application icon of how many messages have been received and play a sound when a new message arrives.

For complete details see: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/Introduction/Introduction.html