BlackBerry PUSH APIs Coming Soon
While I lived in California, I was a frequent attendee at the then fledgling Mobile Monday groups. I even spoke at one in LA during the E3 expo (remember that?) a few years back. After moving back to the frigid North, I was quite pleased to find a flourishing local chapter in Toronto. If you’re interested in the wireless space, I highly recommend you come out. It’s a great place to network with individuals from all areas of the mobile eco-system.
Yesterday marked the first meeting of 2009, and to kick things off, Tyler Lessard (Director of the ISV Alliances partner program at RIM) was the guest speaker. His presentation’s core focus was around the upcoming launch of the BlackBerry App Store and some of the launch logistics.
A few things that piqued my interest:
- RIM has partnered with PayPal to facilitate billing for their App Store
- Older BlackBerrys (i.e. without trackball) will not be supported. Time to buy a Bold!
- Developers will have the ability to specify unique or identical builds across a set of carriers, operating system and firmware versions for their application
- RIM will be launching a PUSH API in the near term
My first reaction after hearing about the integration with PayPal was to groan. My initial fear was that all users would have to go through a PayPal sign-up process when they attached a credit card to their account and as a result, would have to wait a few days before being able to make their first purchase. After talking with Jeff, I realized this was not the case, as PayPal can act purely as a payment processor direct from a credit card.
The crowd was buzzing when Tyler mentioned that RIM would be allowing PUSH capabilities via an API. This has long been a desired feature across all mobile platforms. For those who don’t know, PUSH allows for the delivery of data to a handset without the handset having to submit requests for it. Currently, true PUSH support is sporadic at best and is certainly one of the remaining challenges that developers face. In the past, BES/MDS was required for push on BlackBerry, but this newer API does away with that requirement, opening up the possibility of broad push support across the platform. Some general information around this API can be found here.
If you’ve got an application that could benefit from this, you should consider signing up for the beta program.
[...] it. Josep let me know that RIM has put up a page for their new Hosted Push API Beta. (He spotted it in a post on FiveMobile) I am not sure when this went up but this is the first I have heard of it. (The accompanying [...]
[...] Sinne, da die Applikationen wie etwa IM- oder Twitter-Programme ja proaktiv den Status abfragen. Diese Post auf Five Mobile legt aber die Vermutung nahe, dass bald auch Applikationen eben jene Push-Features nutzen können, [...]