Back at the BlackBerry Developer Conference, RIM announced that it would be offering free push APIs to application devs to allow them to use the same mechanism that enables the BlackBerry’s world-class e-mail, and today, it’s available for all. If you’ve yet to see it in action, push is essentially server-initiated content fetching – that means you don’t have to do something on your phone to get stuff (like ping a mail server every five minutes), it comes to you as soon as it’s on the server. Using the new APIs, up to 8 kb can be pushed out, which is considerably more than the dinky notifications iPhone and Windows Phone offer.
RIM is offering the service in two flavours: “Push Essentials” and “Push Plus”. As you’d expect, Plus is the subscription service, built for apps that use more than 100,000 pushes in a day. The specific cost is tiered based on just how many pushes get pumped through the system. Both work through BIS, but only Plus allows status queries and detailed acknowledgements of the transmission.
Predictably, one of the things I’m looking forward to most from push APIs are instantaneous direct messages and @ replies in third-party Twitter clients, currently only available in the private beta for the official Twitter app. One thing that would really make me happy would be to see Google Latitude proximity alerts enabled by push – that way I don’t get an e-mail a half-hour after I was close to one of my friends, but rather get a buzz and a home screen notification the second Google detects it.
Of course there are plenty of potential implementations, and RIM outlines just a few examples, like how 7digital is currently using push to auto-sync on-device music when within a Wi-Fi zone, how WeatherBug updates immediately with the latest forecasts, and The Hockey News gets you scores as they happen. It’ll be interesting to see the rest of developers play around with the new API, and since it’s free, there’s no reason to not give it a try.
Developers can get a better look at the BlackBerry Push Services right over here, or dive right into the documentation over here.
… aaaaaaand now I can’t get Salt-N-Pepa out of my head.