Sparrow to include push notifications as a paid yearly subscription

If you weren’t a fan of the native Apple Mail app that comes on your iOS device, you might have turned to alternatives such as Sparrow which has been gaining quite a bit of ground recently. Unfortunately one of the drawbacks to Sparrow is that it does not support push notifications as Apple had yanked that feature due to Sparrow using APIs that was originally meant for VoIP apps. Fortunately for users, push notifications could be added on a jailbroken device via a tweak available from the Cydia store, but the good news is that if you were hoping for an official push notification feature, Sparrow will be happy to comply – for a price of course.

With the release of Sparrow v1.2, the company has outed via its blog that push notifications will be coming in a future update. However if you were hoping that it was free, prepare to be disappointed as the company has stated that push notifications will be paid feature that users can take up as a yearly subscription.

“You were more than 16 000 helping us on our Apple quest to get the VoIP privilege.  We can’t thank you enough for your support. Unfortunately, Apple has confirmed that they are not willing to do any exception to the rule and that Sparrow will NOT be granted with the privilege.

This means we’ll have to do Push on our side and that it will be integrated as a yearly subscription into Sparrow’s future update.”

No word on how much this feature would cost or when it will be made available, but we’re not sure how we feel about push notifications being made a paid feature. What do you guys think? Are push notifications a feature worth paying for?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple
Tags: Apps