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They had already implemented it, but were using a way of keeping the app running in the background that's reserved for apps that play music or track your GPS location. Apple rejected the app because Sparrow was neither.

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There is another way, but you can't keep it open forever. Any app can request to stay open for a short time to do anything it wants after close. I use this for an app that saves data to the cloud. No reason to make the user wait around for the save. You can't stay open forever though which I suspect is what they were doing.

Just wanting to point out there is a third option, though not indefinitely.

So that was pull, not push. Push notifications was exactly the solution to the problem of apps constantly pulling in the background. Sparrow couldn't do push because they didn't want to have our emails on their server. Now that Google owns Sparrow, we can hope that they'll provide push. I wouldn't get my hopes up though :/

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