Open Radar

 
Push notifications are great when you have something external trying to talk to the iPhone. I, and I imagine many others, would welcome the ability to access the internal plist used by Springboard to kick off applications at certain times. I only heard about this from a 3rd party, but apparently that is how the Calendar and Clock can appear to run in the background. They register any time specific alarms with Springboard, which then knows that at this time, this application needs to run. I imagine that it is fairly similar to the push notification in how it works in the application.

This has a far reaching implications for applications. There is relatively no need to run in the background with push notifications and if this access was opened up to developers. For instance a recipe timer application wouldn't have to worry about the user switching over to the iPod to change music, the system can have it registered that at this time, the recipe timer application needs to kick off and perhaps display a short message and allow the user to switch to the app.

Push notification is overkill, because it probably would never be able to be as precise, and you would have to communicate with a server to then send the notification down. That is wasteful of resources as the iPhone has everything already in place for a good user experience.

This report is similar to rdar://6784926 which is a dup of rdar://5789160