Pushing iCloud
iCloud builds on a single, high capacity, short message distribution system. Apple has called it “Push Notifications” before but, really, there’s a lot more to it than that. The advantage Apple gains from this isn’t apparent if you’re looking at software checklists — I’d bet there’s an Android announcement in a week or so that claims all the features iOS 5 promises. The thing is this, and it’s an important thing — always bet on the technologies that scale. […] Apple is now betting that multiple applications maintaining their own connections to disparate servers will end up performing poorly on mobile devices. I believe they’re right.
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I'm not quite sure I understand English's point. Is he saying that Android doesn't have the exact same push notifications system that Apple has? As far as I understand it (I might be wrong, as I haven't used it), Google's C2DM does the exact same thing Apple's push notifications do (and has done so since Android 2.2). There already is one server (Google's), and one connection from the device to the server.
Some more about this on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gte, especially https://twitter.com/#!/gte/status/86684231866130432
@LKM I haven’t been following Android very closely, so thanks for pointing that out.
If I only I had the option of hosting the iCloud "truth" on my OS X server box instead of Apple's farm, I'd think it was pretty damn cool technology. As it stands, my enthusiasm is curbed.