A European developer of iPhone software has suggested Apple may be blocking the delivery of push notifications to iPhones that have been unofficially unlocked.

Czech Republic based PoweryBase, developer of the top-selling NotifyMe reminder application for the iPhone, thinks Apple may be blocking the delivery of push messages to iPhones that have been unofficially modified.

The company is at pains to point out that the observed behaviour could be accidental or intentional.

The company says its servers show that five percent of NotifyMe users are running the app on unofficially modified (”hacktivated”) iPhones, and five percent of those are responsible for 80 percent of support requests.

“When the Push based application such as NotifyMe requests an ID from APNS [Apple Push Notification Service], 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 lead developer Pavel Serbajlo.

“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,” he added. [link]