Apple announced the service on June 9, 2008 with an original stated release for that September; however, as stated by Scott Forstall at the iOS 3.0 preview event on March 17, 2009, the rollout was delayed after a decision to restructure the APNs for scalability purposes due to the allegedly "overwhelming" response to the announcement of the APNs.

[3] APNs was also added as an API to Mac OS X 10.7 ("Lion") so that developers could begin updating their third-party applications and start utilizing the service.

[6][7] The release of OS X 10.9 ("Mavericks") included Safari 7.0, which added support for accepting and receiving APNs notifications from websites that the user granted permission to.

[8][9] In December 2023, concerns arose regarding a potential privacy and surveillance loopholes involving push notifications delivered through APNs.

US Senator Ron Wyden revealed, through a letter to the Department of Justice, that both the US government and foreign law enforcement could demand user data from Apple related to push notifications.