Push-to-pull notification on iphone

Question

How is push notification better than pulling notifications on iPhone?

Are there any links with more information about this?

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

If you want to know about push notifications, I assume you are interested in Apple Push Notification.

Here you can read about your architecture:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/ApplePushService/ApplePushService.html

There is no such thing as “pulling" a notification, but using APN gives you the advantage of not having to manually try out the server so often in the application that it usually saves you a lot of battery life if you are interested in telling to the user about sporadic, infrequent events. Using push notifications also allows you to interrupt the user if they do not currently run your application, which, of course, can be very useful in some cases of use.

You should consider what message flow you expect to see between your application and any server components on your system. Push notifications make the most sense when an event occurs that is external to your application, which requires the application to be updated in some way, and where the frequency of these updates is low or greatly changed.

Answer 2

The Pull notification requires that the user launch your application, and your application consumes battery power, constantly tipping over some server (or waiting on some network socket in another thread or using new background services).

Push notifications, if activated by the user, and if the phone has a network connection, allows you to send a message to the phone even if it does not start your application, which prompts the user to want your application to pay attention to it. It uses a much lower network connection than any frequent polling method.