News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:AppGratis pulled from the App Store. Here’s the full story by MartinMoi on Wednesday April 10, 2013 @05:07AM (#5524013)
It's not stated that they used "remote" push notifications, maybe they're talking about local push notifications.

Also, I guess Apple only tried to reach the CEO because when you summit an iOS app, you have to give them the information a person to contact in case they need to. I guess they gave them the CEO information.

Re:AppGratis pulled from the App Store. Here’s the full story by EGreg on Thursday April 11, 2013 @02:08PM (#5533657)
I can say it's a good probability that they did ... and that triggered this problem.