Chapter 17. Local and Push notification services
This chapter covers
As mobile devices become more popular, developers must face new and exciting challenges. One of these major challenges has been around since the dawn of mobile software. It’s related to background processes. All the previous chapters we have been focusing on the foreground activities. When the application is active and running, it’s easy to interact with users. However, what shall we do when the application is not in the foreground. What is the best way to update application data and notify users to launch the application without the user explicitly running the application? Local and Push notifications are Apple’s solution on iOS 4. In this chapter we’ll look at Apple’s local and push notification system, how to use local notifications, how to prepare an application to work with push notifications, and how to create a notification provider on a server. First though, let’s examine what exactly local and push notifications are.