Apple blocking push notifications to hacked iPhones?
By Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 14 July 2009 12:14
The company is at pains to point out that the observed behaviour could be accidental or intentional.
The company says its servers show that five percent of NotifyMe users are running the app on unofficially modified ("hacktivated") iPhones, and five percent of those are responsible for 80 percent of support requests.
"When the Push based application such as NotifyMe requests an ID from APNS [Apple Push Notification Service], the server responds within a second and identifies the device with the unique token. From that point, the connection between APNS and user's device is successfully established," said lead developer Pavel Serbajlo.
"However, on a unofficially activated device, APNS keeps the application wait forever and does not provide any respond at all, keeping user wait infinitely or time out the connection, if the target application is capable of timing out," he added.
PoweryBase has developed a method of warning users if the token is not received within 20 seconds.
"Further investigation shows that Apple may be blocking Push Notification Service on purpose to fight users who break carrier monthly plan agreements and unofficially unlocking these subsidized devices to work with other carriers which Apple is not partnered with," said company officials.
Deliberate or otherwise, the iPhone Dev Team (one of the main sources of iPhone jailbreaking and unlocking utilities) has been working on a software fix for the problem, but a final version has yet to be released. Judging by the Team's blog, the issue is related to jailbreaking, not just unlocking.
NotifyMe costs $A4.99. A limited free trial version is also available.
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