The long awaited push notification service that Apple’s been touting since the birth of the App Store has finally entered load testing. In case you’ve forgotten (it’s been awhile since they promised us this) push notification will allow third-party applications to update their home page icons and pop up status messages without actually opening the program.

The load testing comes with the way Apple plans to implement the system. Every notification has to actually run through Apple’s servers, which gives them a huge amount of data which can be used internally or, and this is the more likely case I’d say, sold to the highest bidder. Apple has only opened testing to App Store developers, and only for one app: a pre-release version of the Associated Press app.

Obviously developers will be jumping all over this thing, if just to see how the system works. From the looks of things, applications will each have their own settings for push notification, which could make buying apps a bit more complicated. Sort of like when you buy a new video game and have to tweak your control schemes, mouse inversion, graphic settings (shush Steam users, I know you’ll get your panties knotted here), each application will require you to set preferences for alerts.

Could we see push as early as the next iPhone release? Doubtful, but a girl can hope, can’t she?

Source: Apple Insider