Apple Push Notification Service

Apple Push Notification Service ( APNs ) - A service created by Apple to send notifications from third-party applications to Apple devices; A notification can contain text, icon, and sound. The notification service was launched on June 17, 2009 with the release of iOS 3, after which the Notification Center and the ability to send local notifications were added to iOS 5. Push notifications were also introduced in OS X 10.7 as an API for developers and improved in OS X 10.8 with the advent of the Notification Center.

Apple Push Notification Service
Industry	Notifications
Current owner	Apple Inc.
Country of origin	USA
Start use	2009
Markets	the whole world
Site	developer.apple.com/noti...

Apple announced the service on June 9, 2008, setting a release date for September; however, as Scott Forstall subsequently stated at a conference on March 17, 2009, implementation was delayed after a decision was made to restructure the system for reasons of scalability due to the developers' overwhelming interest in the service. At both events, Forstall said that push notification technology consumes less battery power than Pull technology that uses background processes ^[1] .

On OS X Lion, an application could use the same API as on iOS to display badges on OS X app icons. Starting with OS X Mountain Lion , users can receive push notifications through the Notification Center . If the application does not start when a notification is received, its icon will appear in the Dock .

OS X Server uses APNs to send mail, calendar, and contacts to devices on network users. Devices such as the iPhone and OS X applications such as the email client or calendar can receive push notifications from OS X Server.

In iOS 8 and later, the maximum notification size is 2 kilobytes ; Apple's push notification service does not miss notifications that exceed this limit. Before iOS 8 and OS X, the limit was 256 bytes . ^[2]

On October 22, 2014, Apple announced ^[3] that SSL 3.0 would be discontinued due to the POODLE vulnerability, and by October 29 all developers would have to use the TLS protocol .