iPhone Notification Thoughts

Apple created their Apple Push Notification system to allow applications to present information to the user, even when the applications are not running.  This helps reduces the amount of CPU usage on the phone, which will help prolong battery life

I would like to see a few things added to this:

• Better support for multiple notifications.  Currently only the last notification is shown. There are a few things that could be done
  
  
  
  1. Create a view that aggregates all of the new notifications since the user last looked at the phone
  
  
  2. Create a prioritization scheme that would make sure that the most important notifications are visible first
  
  
  3. Allow developers to expire previous notifications for their applications
  
  
  
  


• Support to send information back to developers.  Since using Apple's Push Notification requires  developers to have a server that keeps a persistent connection with Apple's servers.  This connection could be used to send information from about the iPhone back to developers
  
  
  
  • For example, this could be used to send location data back to developers.  This would allow Loopt or Google Latitude to update a users location without running an application in the foreground.
  
  
  • Having this implemented in  this manner, it would allow the users to have control over this data
    
    
    
    • Users should be able to go to settings application and disable this feature for all applications, or for particular applications
    
    
    • Apple could control the frequency that the GPS would be turned on, so they could conserve power appropriately.
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  

GPush

The iPhone supports push notification of new emails, bit only for Exchange and for Mobile Me. Apple could implement this for IMAP accounts, with the IMAP IDLE command, but this would remove one of the features that differentiates Mobile Me from the other mail services.

GPush is an iPhone application/ service that enables push notifications when receiving new emails at a gmail account. To configure the application, you enter your gmail credentials in the application, and then it validates them with google. When you then receive a new message on that account, a notification will be sent to your phone, and the GPush application icon will display the count of the number of unread messages.

One main reason I am interested in this application is to potentially save battery. I currently have my phone set to check mail every 15 minutes. Theoretically, with this application, I can turn off periodic checks, and I will be notified when a new message is receives. Then I would launch the mail application to actually download the messages.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that well.  I have only received about 10 notifications on my iPhone, for emails that I have received, even though I have received many more email messages.   This seems to be a problem on the GPush servers, as I receive more push notifications on the iPhone from Boxcar for direct messages that I receive on Twitter.