Now We’re Talking: AIM With Push Support Hits The App Store

by editor on Jun.22, 2009, under TechCrunch

There’s been a lot of talk the past few days since the launch of the iPhone 3.0 software about the lack of Push Notification apps in the App Store. Well, today brings a big one: AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).

Instant messaging apps are perhaps the perfect use for Push Notification, which allows you to use such services without requiring that they be open at all time. In our test of the pre-release beta version of the AIM app with Push, the messages were sent almost instantaneously. In testing it out right now, it looks to be just as fast.

When you first fire up this new version of AIM, it asks you if you’d like to receive Push notifications. You can change this at any time in the settings. And you can also choose if you’d like the notifications to be brief (only say that you have a new IM), feature the sender’s name only, be normal size, or full size.

You can also set how you’d like Push messages to show up on your phone for each app in the device’s settings. You can have it pop up a message, play a sound, badge your icon or do any combination of those.

And Push works with both the free and paid version of the app. The $2.99 paid version removes all advertising.

Push is great for services like IM, but it doesn’t resolve the lack of iPhone background support for all apps. With Push you still can listen to Pandora while doing something else on the web, for example. I still believe it’s only a matter of time before we see some sort of third-party background task support as well.