From time to time Distant Suns will alert you to upcoming events, such as eclipses or meteor showers. Some kind users were upset at getting these messages in the middle of the night and asked that I turn them off. These are called “Apple Push Notifications” and are not email based as some have thought. APNs were a major part of the iOS 3 upgrade and are widely used to alert users of things of interest. Every app that wants to use APN will ask...

All of my apps make use of Apple’s “Push Notification” service, a means of sending out short announcements to users of specific applications without needing those applications to actually be running. When an app is installed that has APN available, the system will warn you and specifically ask if you want to receive notifications from that app. That is under Apple’s domain, so there is no way for a wiley app author to  ”sneak” APN in under the...