iPhone developers will need servers to push

From iPhone developers will need servers to push.

Former TUAW blogger Erica Sadun has a cautionary post for developers regarding the pending push notifications coming to iPhone OS 3.0: better get yourself some reliable servers. The implication, delivered via headline, is that smaller developers won’t be able to afford push notification. Indeed, as Erica says, coding for an app that can run in the background is one thing — you may need to scale things down a bit for resource management — but deploying a reliable push notification system is a tall order by comparison.

Instead of coding once and deploying, developers will now have to manage servers to handle the load of users who will be receiving push notifications.

There’s more (of course).

If you’re going to need industrial-scale servers to run your push-enabled app. then this will have an upward pressure on the application price, and is an opportunity for people using lightweight frameworks such as Twisted to come to the fore.

It may even kill off fart-apps. We can but hope…