Forgive my complete ignorance on the topic: Can't you just push down the information the customer needs? I get that it might be more difficult to use the push API but could an app theoretically have achieved the same experience via push?
Also, I'm not quite sure API enhancements are what a release is "about". Admitting that the crazy 3D designs were over the top and adopting a design similar to Metro and Android Holo seems like a rather large shift for Apple.
Sort of. Yes and no. You can bundle whatever data you want on a push notification, but there are some restrictions:
- Size limits. It's a push notification, so the amount of payload you can attach is pretty limited. Not the whole conversation history of a chat, for example.
- Lack of guarantees or SLA means using it this for time-ordered information is a bad idea. For example, assembling a chat history from a series of pushes is generally a recipe for awfulness. Pushes are not guaranteed to arrive at all, nor arrive in a certain order.
- No sensitive information in pushes, since it's (mostly) transmitted in the clear. Apple recommends payloads be IDs and such and the human-readable component be general. "You have a new message!" rather than "You have a new naughty pic from Jane!".
Long story short, when your app wakes due to a push notification it's almost always smarter to fetch the canonical state over the networking than try to piece it together from the push payload. This incurs a pretty hefty user-visible delay and results in a shitty experience.
Along with what everyone else has said about size limitations, before iOS7, every push notification resulted in a notification on the top screen, and your app would not run until the user clicked the notification.
Also, I'm not quite sure API enhancements are what a release is "about". Admitting that the crazy 3D designs were over the top and adopting a design similar to Metro and Android Holo seems like a rather large shift for Apple.