Apple kills AppGratis' push notifications
What? You thought you were going to be able to make it through another day without an update on what's going on with AppGratis? Sorry to disappoint you -- Apple has now added insult to injury by killing push notifications for AppGratis.
The company let subscribers know this morning in an emailed newsletter that Apple had killed notifications. TUAW sister site TechCrunch received a copy of an email sent to Italian AppGratis subscribers, which told them why they hadn't received a push notification from the app and notes that AppGratis plans to launch a daily special offers newsletter to inform subscribers of the app offers it is famous for.
Simon Dawlat, the outspoken CEO of AppGratis, was back on the blog soapbox this morning noting that the company is planning on going back to its roots in circumventing the app ban by sending out the newsletter to its estimated 12 million users and also putting together an HTML5 web app.
As TechCrunch's Natasha Lomas points out, "Going forward, AppGratis will have to rely on emailing its subscribers (and no one likes to be spammed via email too often) to inform them of offers." Asking those subscribers to migrate to the web app once it is working, with no way to send push notifications to them to generate the clicks that launch an app to top rankings in the App Store, might be nigh impossible.
