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Two weeks after the horrendous launch of Gmail for iOS where everyone ignored the four long years they waited for a Gmail iPhone app and immediately started blasting the terribleness of it (I never felt so together with you guys!), Gmail is back in the App Store (or will be shortly, if you can’t download it yet). And it’s not half bad. But it’s still half an app.
It’s Gmail on your iPhone. Which is good because everyone uses Gmail. But it’s still not great because it’s not a real, full fledged app. It’s a slightly more reliable version of their web app because it’s always there and not in danger of Safari’s refreshing. Unlike the previous version that popped up in the app store, Gmail actually works now. Gone are the stutters, the lag, the pain and disappointment of using a mediocre Gmail app and in its place is an app that comes with lower expectations but actually has some use. I hated the uselessness of the first Gmail app and deleted the leper of an app for fear of it contaminating everything around it. Now? I’m keeping it around.
First things first: I’m not replacing the stock iOS app with Gmail because there’s still a lot it can’t do. It doesn’t support multiple accounts. There weirdly isn’t support for any banner notifications. It doesn’t keep many messages offline. And so on and so on. But because I use an Exchange set up for my Gmail to get push e-mail, I like having Gmail as a secondary app just in case I need to do fuller searches. Also, the app is nice. The slickness properties were there in the beginning but it just didn’t work. But now that I don’t have a fear of crashing the app, the hidden side column is a really smart UI choice and the app is consistent with the new Gmail UI (which you may hate or love).
Gmail for iOS is either available on the App Store, or will be shortly
Push notifications (even with gmail configured as an exchange server) just completely fail half of the time on my 4s. Will be doing a side-by-side comparison which of the two apps receives a notification first when I sent myself an email.
I came from a blackberry directly to the 4s, now as much as I didn’t like not-having apps on an ancient operating system, at least it could push my emails the moment I got them reliably!
Bit of a wrong move there, moving to the buggy platform with poor battery life, should have gone to Droidsavers
Not a fan of iPhone either?
Darrell, will you ever cease to troll iOS posts?
Don’t worry, I do enjoy your lighthearted applebashing, but just to counter, at least my phone doesn’t randomly reboot (serious concern apparently, I had to root my friends’ galaxy ace for him because his stock rebooted on its own accord about 3 times a day)
I like it, but it won’t be replacing the in-built email app (yet!) It is, however, useful for viewing my priority and starred messages, and for archiving messages as you can’t (yet) due this in the Mail app.