New Tweak Adds Push Notifications To Sparrow For iPhone Email App [Jailbreak]

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Sparrow Push brings badge notifications to the iPhone's newest email app.
Sparrow Push brings badge notifications to the iPhone's newest email app.

A new jailbreak tweak adds push notifications to the popular iPhone email app called Sparrow. We’ve already shown you a roundabout way to get push for Sparrow with the Boxcar app on a non-jailbroken iPhone, but you can now easily enable notifications with a Cydia tweak called Sparrow Push.

Developer Kim Streich (the guy behind the amazing jailbreak app 3G Unrestrictor) explains:

After long anticipation the iPhone application “Sparrow” was released with a disappointing limitation through Apple’s restrictions: Users are not notified of new mails if the application is not running. The jailbreak tweak “Sparrow Push” enables this functionality using IMAP idle and makes Sparrow a complete replacement for the stock mail client on the iPhone.

Sparrow Push will also do its best to restart Sparrow if it quits or you restart your iPhone.

Streich also notes that Notification Center integration and “mailto:” links integration features are planned for the next update to Sparrow Push. The tweak is free in Cydia’s BigBoss repo and available now.

Due to the nature of how iOS push notifications are invoked by Sparrow Push, your iPhone’s battery life shouldn’t be affected more than it would be when running the stock Mail app with push turned on.

Keep in mind that, because there is no Notification Center integration yet, you won’t get pop-ups for new emails. All this tweak does is make the Sparrow app icon update with badge notifications. For those that feel overwhelmed with email, the experience may be a refreshing one.

As we said in our review, Sparrow has a lot of features that make it a compelling replacement for Apple’s Mail app. Will push notifications be enough to make you switch from Mail to Sparrow? Let us know what you think of this new tweak in the comments.

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