Before every iOS app in the App Store began sending you push notifications — whether you want them or not — the best way to stay on top of your alerts was with Boxcar, a free app that delivers push notifications on behalf of a huge catalog of apps. In its App Store description, Boxcar boasts about delivering over 1 billion notifications since its debut in July 2009. But it seems the service may have finally ended.
The Next Web notes that Boxcar users are reporting that service has been offline for some time now, and some have been without access to push notifications “for several days.” The app simply throws up an ” Uh oh!” error message that explains it cannot connect to the server.
Users have been sending messages to Boxcar’s official Twitter account (@Boxcar), but the company is yet to respond to any of these messages publicly. In fact, there has been no action on its account since June 20. Furthermore, the Boxcar website at boxcar.io is no longer online.
Despite official confirmation from Boxcar, then, it certainly seems as though the service may have come to an end. But admittedly, it’s no longer an app that we rely on all that frequently. Now that the vast majority of iOS apps support push notifications, third-party solutions like Boxcar are no longer necessary. And interest in these services is quickly falling.
As The Next Web notes, this kind of outage was once a cause for panic for Boxcar users in its heyday. But today users are simply acknowledging it’s offline and continuing without it.
Is Boxcar working for you?
Source: The Next Web
Killian Bell is a freelance writer based in the U.K. He has an interest in all things tech and also covers Android over at CultofAndroid.com. You can follow him on Twitter via @killianbell.
5 responses to “Has Boxcar Thrown In The Towel On Third-Party Push Notifications?”
I suggest using my iPhone application Push 4.0 available at http://2apn.com – it was featured by ReadWriteWeb as the top 10 geeky RSS iPhone app for its push availability: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_feed_rss_technologies_of_2011.php
Boxcar.IO popped up on my screen this morning.
Boxcar.IO popped up on my screen this morning.
The site is online but the service began to stop pushing quite a while ago. I already left the sinking ship last month.
Sleazy way to spam for your app, fabienpenso. Just so everyone, knows, Push 4.0 is a subscription model where you have to keep paying for bundles of notifications. Also, if you’re not careful when setting it up, its default is to push an ad for itself out to your Twitter followers. Cute!
Back on topic — I’m getting very sporadic notifications on Boxcar, but it does appear to be dead. I wrote support about a month ago about missing notifications, got no response. Deactivating it presently, will be relying on the official Gmail and Twitter apps for notifications.