Push Notifications and Long Battery Life with Notifications API Beta

kevinSharp | 08 December, 2010 19:46

The new Notifications API Beta is now available as a plug-in to the Nokia Qt SDK. The objective is clear: today’s mobile user expects real-time information, and 3 out of 4 developers surveyed want to meet that expectation by building native apps which offer push updates. (Note: you need to log in to access the plug-in.)

The challenge

Once you dig into the details you uncover some serious user experience problems. Battery life plummets when multiple applications independently implement polling or push processes to drive consumer engagement. The resulting inefficient radio use drains the battery quickly, and frustrated consumers learn to turn off updates so their device can last the whole day. They end up crippling their treasured smartphones into the functional equivalents of basic feature phones. It’s like running a Ferrari at 50km/hr because you don’t want to run out of petrol - no one is happy.

The solution

The answer is cooperation. Nokia along with other device manufacturers have looked at ways to address this key consumer experience issue and are pleased to introduce a shared-push notification service which can be enabled on 3rd party apps using the Notification API. With the service enabled, applications on Nokia devices don’t need to constantly poll or maintain multiple connections across the network, saving both bandwidth and battery life. This helps developers to differentiate applications so they can more easily penetrate the worldwide market of existing Symbian and future MeeGo mobile users.

A few details

Using the Notifications API, applications access a Nokia-hosted notifications service: a shared persistent connection that’s optimized to assure lightweight bandwidth use. Notifications API includes a Service (HTTP REST) API for pushing notifications and a Client (Qt) API for receiving notifications.

Designed to be easy to implement, the client API is based on 6 functions that need to be called or implemented by the application to define registration, state and action triggered when the notification is received.

All the necessary documentation, libraries and emulator are available on the Forum Nokia Project site. You need to log in to access the project. This plug-in is compatible with the current Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 .

Early reviews from alpha testing have been quite positive: Tobias Kemper, General Manager at Nimbuzz told us:  “The Ovi Notifications API was very streamlined and easy to implement as a part of the Nimbuzz app, within a matter of hours we were able to send and receive notifications from our server to the device.” 

Check out the latest Web Seminar tutorial or White Paper to learn more about the Notifications API and visit the project site to get your own copy of the DevKit.

Let us know what you think of this latest offering – here and on the project discussions forum.

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