Hacker News Reader

Comment by superasn | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully this will force Apple to maybe think about giving users a choice of setting default web browser as more and more people (like me) write to them complaining about it.

Just like they denied Sparrow of push notifications at first but as more and more users started pestering them about it, they finally had to give in.

View on HN

Sparrow tried to position it like that, but that was not the real story: it was not Apple "blocking" them, it was that they did not want to put in the effort to setup a real push service, and instead wanted to run all the time on the device (using battery) to maintain an open connection. Which, of course, not having every app doing that is exactly the problem that push notifications, as implemented by Apple, were designed to solve.

Actually they don't want to access your email, so they can't run a push notification service. And Apple Mail.app does the pulling thing, so allowing to change default Internet app or Mail app would not cause a problem : another app pulls, that's it

Sparrow has never worked on any email account I have tried or own. Hotmail, my gmail, fastmail - nothing. I have never been able to use it.

  Just like they denied Sparrow of push notifications at first but as more and more users started pestering them about it, they finally had to give in.

As far as I can Google, they didn't give in - and Sparrow ended up having to do it the same way everyone else does... with them in the middle?

The issue was Sparrow would have to handle notifications themselves, which would mean every user's Gmail account (user, plaintext password, and mails) streaming through their servers that likely aren't hardened against attackers nearly as well as Google's. Understandably, this is a risk they didn't want to take.

Sparrow still doesn't have push notifications.

Oh you're right. A friend of mine showed me that Sparrow has finally got push notifications so I assumed they had given in. Never thought that it was because he is running a jailbroken device. Darn Apple :/

Yeah, how dare Apple apply the exact same rules to Sparrow that they do to every single other 3rd-party iOS app!

Or, how dare they only allow specific actions to their own apps that the deny to third party developers...

They're doing exactly what they except Sparrow do if I'm not mistaken: run a server and push mail. There's no magic involved.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com