Identifying iPhone OS's on a Network and Sending Push Notifications

Question

tldr; Can you identify devices on your network as an iPhone OS device easily? Can you send push notifications to devices identified as using the iPhone OS on your network without a a target app?

Is is possible to identify which devices on a network are using the iPhone OS?

With this information, is it possible to send push notifications to these devices?

From my understanding, your application server will contact APNs, which will contact the users. So, the above would be impossible. Can someone confirm this for me?

Thanks, P.S.

Answer 1

If you look at the Apple's documentation for the UIDevice class : http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/uikit/reference/UIDevice_Class/Reference/UIDevice.html

For example, [[UIDevice currentDevice] model] wil give you strings like @”iPhone” and @”iPod touch”.

Then in your App Delegate method "application:didRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithDeviceToken:", you can store the device model with the device token on your server.

You will be able to send push notification to a given model with that. If you use UrbanAirship, you could use the "tag" option.

Answer 2

As far as I know, iPhones don't announce their presence in a special way within the network. You might be able to guess what devices are iPhones on your local network by looking at the MAC address of responding hosts.

No, push notifications are delivered over an encrypted connection between iPhone and APN servers and always target a specific application on a device. You're not able to send a push notification to arbitrary devices on your network (at least not without hacking the devices).