There are a fair amount of third-party iPhone email clients out there, but few ever received the kind of reception that Sparrow for iPhone got a few weeks ago. Sadly, though, unless you have a jailbroken iPhone or use a third-party service like Boxcar, you won’t be able to get push notifications for new emails from Sparrow, but this could soon change. Apple, in its infinite wisdom, decided that Sparrow couldn’t use the same kind of special push mechanism that VoIP apps like Skype use for calls and chats. According to Sparrow, the team could have enabled regular push notifications, but that would have meant storing all of its users email credentials on its own servers. Given that Sparrow is being developed by a small startup without a strong security background, the team decided that this was too much of a risk. Today, Sparrow launched version 1.1 of its app. While this update includes a fair number of interesting new features, maybe the most interesting part of the announcement is that the Sparrow team will submit the next version of the app with built-in support for VoIP-style push notifications based on the assumption “that Apple might revise its position on the Push API.”
TechCrunch