Native Gmail app coming to iPhone, iPad?

The word on the street is that a Gmail app for iOS is about to hit Apple's App Store. If true, not only would iPhone and iPad Gmailers benefit, but Android device makers would lose one of their advantages over Apple's iDevices. This tantalizing tidbit comes from the personal blog of TechCrunch columnist MG Siegler, who reports …

[nebcfsj]

bogus article

why bother with an APP for gmail when the built in Mail APP does gmail and several other mail accounts at the same time just fine.

I must admit that I see more garbage apps than useful ones, and this is potentially in the same category because it is simply not needed by anyone except those who do not know any better.

[Benny]

I was thinking the same thing.

All my Exchange and Gmail email comes through comes through in the default Mail app, I can't see any reason why you would need this?

[Goat Jam]

You have obviously

never tried to find an old email using the iOS mail client

[Dave Fox]

why use a native Gmail app

Simple answer - to use the native Gmail facilities not available using a "standard" mail app.

Regular Gmail users probably make great use of label, conversation muting, priority inbox etc etc, and these are all available in the native Gmail app.

[cloudgazer]

Because gmail is different. Labels aren't folders, deletion doesn't really work the same way. The default mail app is a poor substitute to a proper gmail app.

[Anonymous Coward]

Android advantage soon undermined ?

Are you joking ?

No flash, saddled with itunes, no memory card, a complete bitch to get content on and off, no HDMI included etc etc.

The ipad2 is nice hardware turned in a very expensive picture frame by Apple unless you wish to fork out big bucks to make it anything useful.

[ScissorHands]

Get off my lawn!

What's wrong with IMAP, POP, and e-mail clients? Why is there a need for a special Gmail app when you can use the web, or even a regular e-mail client and save a lot of bandwidth?

Kids these days...

[Sean Baggaley 1]

What he said.

Open Standards a bloody sight more useful to me than all the worthless source code in Stallman Land.

Say what you like about Apple, but at least they've never pretended to be anything other than a hardware manufacturer operating in the consumer electronics market. Unlike Google, whose purpose is to _spy_ on your every move on the internet and sell that juicy data on to advertisers, all while loudly, and hypocritically, claiming not to be "evil".

I don't see anyone whining that XBox360 games won't run on a PS3, for f*ck's sake, so quit with the "walled garden" bullshit too: Android is just as "closed"—unless you're seriously claiming that Android apps will run just fine on other platforms.

As for Adobe's Flash...

The sheer hypocrisy of complaining about Apple's not supporting Flash from fanatics of "openness" is delicious given Adobe's track record. I don't see anyone complaining about the lack of Silverlight or Unity plugin support in the iOS versions of Safari. Double standards, much?

Flash is a *proprietary* third-party plugin that is absolutely NOT part of the W3C web standards, and never has been. Mobile Safari browses *standards-compliant* websites just fine.

Safari on iOS does not support ANY plugins. None. Zip. Nada. It's a pure-play "web standards only" browser. That's all it was ever meant to be, and all it *should* be. There are *open* standards for building websites for a bloody good reason.

The whole *point* of a website is that it can be accessed by people all over the world, on *any* compatible browser. Including Lynx, browsers linked to Braille displays, systems with screen readers, and plenty more variations.

If your website cannot be "read" by such systems, you're doing it wrong. There is no debate here. No argument. The above is how the web was *meant* to be used. Ask Mr. Berners-Lee. The moment you wrap your precious content up in a proprietary package, you might as well have slapped DRM around it, because there *will* be many users who will simply be unable to access it. Guaranteed.

The bottom line: If you're relying on Flash for your websites, the fault for taking such an idiotic approach to web design is yours, and yours alone. That so many web designers cried "Foul!" when Apple made their design choice is merely a testament to how many incompetent web designers there are out there. This debate reflects poorly on them, not Apple.

[Anonymous Coward]

However...

As with all Google apps on Apple, they are either restricted by what Apple allow, or Google have intentionally made them inferior to their Android counterparts.

No no worries there then...

[ratfox]

Intentionally inferior?

Do you have examples? (note that the Maps iPhone app uses Google data, but was coded by Apple)

[Ralph B]

One Example

The Google+ app for iOS is still not iPad-capable (except in blurry 2x mode)

[Dave Fox]

Not exactly a great example though is it? There's no Honeycomb optimised version of Google+ for Android tablets as yet - the fact that Android apps can often scale depending on screen resolution, as Google+ does, is immaterial. How long *exactly* did it take for Facebook to launch an iPad version of their app?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Barry trying to be the new Webster Phreaky, or is he just a mindless fandroid?

[Rameses Niblick the Third (KKWWMT)]

Seriously?

You mean the main reason people buy Android phones over iPhones is because of the native GMail app? And if it does make it to iOS, Android phone makers will lose one of their main selling points?

Are you high or something?

I like Android for the overall experience, its more intuitive to use for me, and I like the phones. I didn't even use GMail before I got Android, it's only been since that I've started using it.

Sorry, but this article is such a load of rubbish.

[Gene Cash]

Not an advantage...

The Gmail app is garbage.

It's still got the huge issue with "conversations" that used to infect the web app. If you delete one message in a thread, it insists on deleting every other message in the thread as well.

I tried for a couple weeks to figure out how turn it off, before turning gmail sync off and switching to another email app. Google finally provided the ability to turn it off in the web app after hundreds of thousands of complaints, but the Android app is still broken.

[@brykins]

Who even needs a Gmail app?

I have an Android phone and an iPad. Both of them get instant, push email notifications and on neither of them do I use a "Google" application. Gmail works fine as a bog-standard IMAP server which means my Gmail comes to the same application as my Hotmail and my own domain-based emails.

Puzzles me why Google would do this though - do they NOT want Android to succeed?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Puzzles me why Google would do this though - do they NOT want Android to succeed?"

Google's primary goal is ads - Gmail on iPhone = ads in email on iPhone. Essentially.

That is all Android really is to Google, another way to get people online and viewing ads. Not that that's a bad thing, Google make some awesome software and give it away free to entice you to share your personal life - that's their business model and it works.

[Long Fei]

Whut?

I don't use the native email app on my Android, and I'm fairly sure most people don't rank that highly when choosing their phone!

Mountain out of a molehill here.

[HipposRule]

Unfortunately

I can't get my normal email to work on Android (it's a pipex one) as it keeps on saying that my password is wrong when it definitely isn't...

[Pooka]

Who stole my widget?

I don't mind what they are doing with the iDevice apps, just so long as they give me back my G+ widget.....

[Cleverfiend]

Yes please

I use lots of labels to sort my mail - I love using the Android client, far better than using any other client since the colour coding etc comes through as well. I'll also be able to delete email from my mail client rather than archiving it - I tend to do mail management on the web interface when using iOS, a native app would be better. Power GMail users of the world rejoice!

[D@v3]

Archiving

FYI.

On iOS, you can delete Gmail emails from the Mail app (instead of archiving them).

Go to the Mail, Contacts, Calendars section in Settings, click the account you want to change, and toggle "Archive Messages"

[Cleverfiend]

Archiving

@D@v3 that option doesn't seem to appear for exchange accounts, you have to set them up as a GMail account (IMAP) to get that to appear. It still doesn't bring other native GMail features like multiple labels to your mail - bring on the iOS app!

[D@v3]

exchange

That option indeed doesn't appear, but i thought we were talking about GMail here, not exchange, anyway.

I have found, that when I delete an email from my the exchage account on my idevice, it deletes it, also moves it from my outlook inbox to my deleted items. Not really sure what else you'd want it to do, (apart from labels and all that)