September over, with neither hide nor hair of push notifications

Happy October, everyone! Wait, why aren’t you smiling? Lack of push notifications got you down? Me too.

When Scott Forstall first announced these push notifications in June, I was all giddy inside. It was an inventive way to allow applications to continue their purpose while not running, without consuming those ever important system resources. To be able to quit my AIM application and yet still see when I have a new IM would be more than fantastic. The feature was slated for September, and yet, despite pushing iPhone 2.1 out the door, it is now October, and the push notifications aren’t anywhere I can see.

In a way, this isn’t a bad thing, because it shows Apple has learned from its mistakes with the MobileMe / iPhone 3G launch of July. iPhone 2.1 was the best release for iPhone yet, significantly speeding things up without causing any major new bugs. Had the push notifications remained in the 2.1 release, as they were in initial betas, the software might not have been the success that it was.