"Apple have resisted calls to allow what are known as ‘background apps’ on the iPhone. Letting applications run continuously in the background can suck up battery power, deplete memory resources, and generally make things treacle slow. Instead, Apple have launched a Push Notification service to wake up the phone, and you have to initiate that request through an Apple platform.
Operators should tread very carefully here. Apple could easily offer to integrate with the paging feature of host networks (or kludge it with SMS) to increase the efficiency of this process. The telco then has no monopoly over reaching to the user and activating the phone using the paging service. Apple can bunch notifications from many applications, since they control the whole application ecosystem — and future presence-driven apps are likely to be very chatty. And you don’t have to be too bright to realise that one of the most likely things to be pushed to a phone in future is an advert, mediated again by Apple."
