Not device background. IE submit requests to the iOS mothership and to the endpoint URL to talk to each other and work things out.
In the context of notifications this isn't an issue for when the app is in the foreground. But when it's in the background the app's event loop isn't ran consistently, so you might not get the notification for hours. To my knowledge the ONLY way to consistently push notifications for apps in the background is through apple's push gateways.
Mobiles aren't "real computers" in the sense of the Internet. They are not intended to be always on; nor always connected from a stable address. They are portable (very smart) terminals, often with poor text input (but usually with reasonable quality camera and microphones), and often a large local cache.
> iPhone push notifications could only be sent with a signing key tied to the same developer account as used to publish the client application.
> That meant it was impossible to send push notifications from your own XMPP server to a generic XMPP client written by someone else.
and you were replying to
> This restriction that push notifications must only come from the developer’s server is a restriction imposed by Apple and their App Store.
So I'm confused as to what you mean.
> An __off device__ request that is processed server to server.
> ... They are portable (very smart) terminals ...
How does this relate to methods of reliably pushing notifications to an iPhone?