Push Notifications with Attachments?

I’m not sure how the infrastructure for iOS’s push notifications is set up, but I wonder if Apple’s next update to the system could include attachments with those notifications that would contain data that the app. That app could retrieve the data upon launch, thus getting around the inability to run apps in the background. That would be nice for applications like Instapaper that can only grab articles on launch, though it would require some work on the backend to make happen, and maybe some more bandwidth and processor power. This would be much better than running the app in the background, too, because it doesn’t waste energy on repeatedly checking for stuff. The knockoff Instapaper app on my Android phone does that, and my options are to set it to update every 6 or 12 hours and hope I don’t need articles in the intervening time, or update constantly and destroy my battery.

Just throwing out ideas that have probably been thrown out before, but this notification hangup seems to be one of the worst things about iOS right now and it’s time someone fixed the issue.