Apple blocking push notifications on Hactivated iPhones?

Is Apple trying to block Push Notifications on SIM-unlocked iPhones running on non-Apple blessed carriers?  Czech-based PoweryBase reports that Hactivated iPhones don’t get a response from Apple’s Push Notification servers.

Further investigation shows that Apple may be blocking Push Notification Service on purpose to fight users who break carrier monthly plan agreements and unofficially unlocking these subsidized devices to work with other carriers which Apple is not partnered with.

“When the Push based application such as NotifyMe requests an ID from APNS, the server responds within a second and identifies the device with the unique token. From that point, the connection between APNS and user’s device is successfully established,” said Pavel Serbajlo, PoweryBase’s lead developer. “However, on a unofficially activated device, APNS keeps the application wait forever and does not provide any respond at all, keeping user wait infinitely or time out the connection, if the target application is capable of timing out.”

While not responding to request if the client application is requesting unexpected data is common in small UDP based services, big infrastructures such as APNS usually respond with an error to let the users or 3rd party developers know what caused the connection to fail for further debugging. The described scenario might not be tested at Apple, or more possibly, the behavior is intentional.

..and are responsible for most of their support calls and bad ratings…

PoweryBase reports that after first seven sales days of NotifyMe, company’s server database statistics show about 5 percent of users using unofficially modified or so called “hacktivated” iPhones. 5 percent of these users generate more than 80 percent of customer support requests daily, claiming the application does not work as advertised.

The problem could lie in the fact that Apple protects its Push Notification servers from requests from unknown sources (i.e other telcos?)….though Push works over Wifi, so that point is probably moot.

Via AppAdvice