Confirmed: Sparrow for iPhone push notifications will require a yearly subscription

If you need yet another reason to jailbreak your iPhone, here it is: The popular Sparrow for iPhone email client will require a yearly subscription to enable push notifications for incoming messages. The sad news has been officially confirmed by developer Dom Leca and the Sparrow team.

Apple apparently told them they “are not willing to do any exception to the rule” concerning push support in Sparrow. Of course, those with a jailbroken iPhone can simply download Sparrow Push, a handy little tweak that adds this useful feature to the otherwise awesome email client at no additional cost.

Push notifications are coming in a future version of Sparrow for iPhone, which has just been updated with the following new features…

Sparrow for iPhone version 1.2 comes now speaks nine languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Russian and Chinese), supports landscape message composing and provides easier navigation between messages simply by swiping up and down.

When switching from a conversation to another, you’ll see a special separator clearly showing you’re swiping to a new conversation.

Additionally, the app now lets you rename, create or delete all your labels and folders, as seen in a pair of screenshots above.

And here’s landscape composing in action.

The release squashed a few bugs as well, including composer scrolling with some keyboards, draft being displayed having empty cells in all mail and wrong contact being kept in autosuggest when composing.

According to the official blog post, you will have to commit to a yearly subscription to enjoy push notifications for incoming mail messages when this feature gets implemented in one of the future versions of the program:

Unfortunately, Apple has confirmed that they are not willing to do any exception to the rule and that Sparrow will NOT be granted with the privilege.

This means we’ll have to do Push on our side and that it will be integrated as a yearly subscription into Sparrow’s future update.

Push will be available “in future updates”, the team wrote on Twitter.

Sparrow 1.2 for iPhone is available right now from the App Store, costing three bucks a pop.

Sparrow for Mac 1.6 is also “coming soon”, the developer confirmed

I’m aware the team’s hands are tied because of Apple’s strict policies.

Although chances of it happening anytime soon are pretty slim, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that with iOS 6 Apple will finally allow users to chose their default browser or email client.

Would you pay to get push notifications in Sparrow for iPhone?