> Microsoft's Push Notification Service (WNS) is a HTTP-based, which is awesome. Apple introduce a TCP-based approach to push notifications that basically requires you to write a dedicated sever (again, somehow, Apple didn't specify how to do) to send your push notifications through their APNS. No one rolls their own APNS server because it's too hard and there's Urban Airship.

This is ostensibly a professional engineer, and this position drives me bonkers ("not HTTP, too hard")!

Apple provided protocol documentation and a very, very simple TCP+SSL protocol. Rolling your own client should be a matter of a day or two of work, at the absolute maximum.

Apple even provides sample code: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Networ...

The fact that people are frightened of TCP and a simple binary protocol is a mind-boggling indictment of the ineptitude and inexperience of the engineers that have been placed in a position of responsibility.

I dealt with a server team recently that refused to consider a push-based feature because it would "cost too much to send that many pushes through Urban Airship". Implementing their own local client for the protocol never occurred to them, and our doing so for them dismissed out of hand ("too complicated").