Tip rather than question: Pseudo-Push functionality through pushed email

Question

I was just wondering if anybody was using this technique:

Since Push Notifications will only be coming with OS 3.0, I've been thinking of using Email Pushs (Exchange, mobile.me) as a workaround:

You can register a URL, eg. myxyappname:// for your own app in iPhone. (See examples @ developer.apple.com/iphone)

If you have a server and want to push something app-specific to your subscribers, you can just send them an email containing a specific link, eg. myxyappname://myxyappname?requesttype=X&id=Y

When the user receives the email (pushed, so should be fast...) and clicks on the mentioned link, your app will start on the iPhone automatically (if your app registered the url correctly), and within your app you can parse the url and display the corresponding info, based on the query string.

old fart?

Answer 1

Works great. Don't forget you can send your custom URL via sms as well.

Answer 2

I had the same idea a while back but I wasn't sure if you could register custom URL schema on iPhone. It's good to know that you can. I'm working on a board game and I had thought to do play-by-email, but in the end it just seemed like too much trouble to ask the user to set up their SMTP info. (In the age of webmail most people probably don't even know what that is!)

BTW, sending the URL via SMS excludes all iPod Touch users. Probably not a good thing.