This is where I suggest you start reading: https://developer.apple.com/notifications/
Push notifications, as you've no doubt seen in other apps, are for summary information about an event, like a new property that meets their criteria as you said. I believe the rule of thumb is you have 37 characters in the content of the notification plus a title and on iOS you have a subtitle. Larger devices can display more, but 37 is the magic number for iPhone 5 and smaller android devices. When the user's app is closed or in the background, a notification will play a sound, show a banner with a title and the short message, and you can update the banner on the app's icon to show there are unread notifications. You can send a listing id in the PN. When the user taps the banner, your app will launch and your app's PN listener will execute and you can do what you want with the listing id. Pull that data and navigate to the view. Keep in mind people will turn off PNs for your app if you hit them too often. Best to throttle notifications if their search criteria will result in sending dozens of notifications a day. Limit to just a few per day to prevent them from turning them off for your app, or uninstalling your app and installing Trulia instead. ;-) Erik
