Did you catch what the biggest change is to the iPhone 3G?
No, it is not the namesake 3G chip and it is not push email per se.
Apple has decided to replicate a portion of BlackBerry Server. This opens the iPhone up to outages similar to the ones Blackberry users experience when the BIS/BES servers go down.
The change I am talking about is the persistent connection to an Apple server to allow for push notifications. First, let me say that I think push notifications are bad ass. I have shown many iPhone users the brilliance of the Facebook app for Blackberry that implements a similar notification system. From the looks of the iPhone 3G demo it looks like Apple has recognized that notifications are a key feature and has found a way to improve on them.
I appreciate the way that Apple is using push notifications to handle part of the problem of “background tasks” (the other problem is persistence, which I assume they are addressing another way). However, I am not sure that Apple can really predict the popularity of these push notifications. I imagine that there will be push notifications delivered to my iPhone from Twitter, Whrrl, Facebook, IM, Google Docs, and more. It could be that the push notifications get so popular that Apple has a hard time keeping up with the demand.
It may be that it will never be an issue. It just scares me because this appears to be a single point of failure on what I think will be the iPhone 3G’s most used feature.
Prediction: Push notifications will be the single most used feature on the iPhone 3G. More than multi-touch, more than web browsing, more than MobileMe, more than even the phone.
Per Marc’s comment below this is actually an issue for all iPhones as of iPhone 2.0 and not just the iPhone 3G.
7 Comments
For the most part, I agree with you. The problem with the Blackberry outages is really a problem with decentralization. You have a single point of failure. From what I’ve heard, Apple can help to fix that with XMPP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber). It is built around the idea of being decentralized. So all of these messages being sent to the server, and the pushed down to the client, can be done in a more efficient way by using multiple servers handling the messaging.
Also, XMPP is an open source protocol. Exactly what Apple has shown to like with it’s server software. What do you think the chances are that the next version of their server software, Snow Leopard, uses XMPP for pushing out internal, corporate information?
Jon,
Do you have a reference for Apple using XMPP for the Push Notifications? The way I have heard Push Notifications explained, it will be a single point of failure with or without XMPP since all of the notifications will be routed through an Apple service.
http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/official_xmpp_client_in_the_iphone/
It is really just a rumor and there hasn’t been any confirmation on whether or not XMPP will be supported. Their isn’t an SDK out yet using the push framework, so we’ll have to just wait and see what happens.
If it isn’t decentralized, then you’ve hit the nail on the head. All of the traffic from pushing out all those notifications will cripple their infrastructure.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this is iPhone 2.0 functionality. So you won’t need a 3G iPhone to get it.
Oooh, good call Marc!
Good “call”???? What are you, a comedian? :p
Does BIS/BES push the entire message or just a notification? Will Apple’s notification service send only a notification (thus requiring the target app to pull the rest of the message, if there is one)? It strikes me that scaling a service that simply forwards SMS-length notifications is vastly easier than scaling a service that forwards email-length messages.