Gmail App For iPhone: A Google Mistake?
Jason Gilbert for Huff Post Tech Argle Wargle (a couple of those words might be wrong, but they somehow get the direction of the site across better) argues Google are huge idiot-faces for making a Gmail app for Apple’s iPhone, a phone that, note, is somewhat popular.
One of the biggest advantages of owning a Nintendo (or Super Nintendo, or N64) when I was growing up was Super Mario Brothers.
Ooh, ooh, let me guess: you’re going to make a half-arsed analogy about the advantages of device lock-in for goodies, despite, you know, Google generally (and, lately, sometimes failing to) advocate openness?
[argle wargle bargle…]
Checking your Gmail on an Android phone carries with it a similar sense of superiority. For all the disagreements between Fandroids and the Apple partisans, there should be no dispute that the native Gmail for any Android phone is far, far better than however you’re checking your Gmail on an iPhone. It is one of the great selling points of Android devices over iPhones: The ability to star conversations, the real-time push notifications, the feeling that the inbox was truly integrated to the phone. If you were only buying a smartphone to check Gmail and surf the web, you would be crazy not to get an Android phone that fit your specs.
Also: you’d be crazy. Anyway, Gilbert is surprised that Google might be able to unleash an iOS client.
Which is why it is so surprising that Google is apparently going to release a Gmail app for the iPhone.
See?
Why is Google doing this?
Why indeed? TELL US, GILBERT! WE NEED TO KNOW!
Why, after three and a half years of ignoring the App Store,
Ignoring, obviously, its 11 apps that are currently in the App Store…
and after surpassing iOS with their own mobile operating system,
With lots of low-cost devices made by manufacturers thinking that the 1990s and 2000s was a great time to build Windows PCs, because everyone made SO MUCH MONEY…
would Google relent and give up one of its great, tangible, unarguable advantages over Apple’s iPhone? You’re in a vicious, ugly, man-on-man tussle with Apple, trying to win over every customer you can to your operating system. Apple doesn’t have a weapon in this fight, and you’re going to let them borrow your knife?
It doesn’t compute.
Perhaps because Google is an advertising company and everything else it does is a means to an end? Or perhaps because Google’s board aren’t complete dicks and recognise that because iOS is a massive market, Google can ultimately make more money by working with it as well as fighting against it?
Argle wargle fargle bargle.
Yes, well, that’s quite enough of that.
Update: Or perhaps Google really does hate iOS. Twitter dev Loren Brichter says on Twitter:
The Gmail app is a fucking web view. Even the list of messages. Why?
Personally, I blame Jason Gilbert.
GMail on an iPhone? Why that would be crazy, like Apple putting iTunes on Wind..hangonaminnit.
Uh. Yeah, personally, I’d say it’s a mistake. In that I’ve used Gmail since the start, the iOS mail client works fine and is all synchronised. Most importantly however, although there are 5 Gmail accounts I need to keep constantly checking, there are also three non-Gmail accounts that are just as important.
Have Gmail convinced me to use something that isn’t the iOS mail client? No. Can I see any benefits to doing so? No. Will the Gmail app let me check mail from other types of account such as Yahoo? I doubt it. Will the Gmail app let me check mail from multiple Gmail accounts at once? I am guessing ‘no’.
Who’s using it anyway? Who is this target market of people who can see but ignore the iOS mail client as being too… I dunno. Complicated? It isn’t even slightly and the app isn’t deletable but hey, maybe that’s it! People who can’t enter their username and password into the iOS mail client! They’ll instead be catered for by entering their password into the App Store and then doing so again into the Gmail mail client.
No, wait, that doesn’t make any sense either!
So what’s the fucking point of it? I couldn’t care less if they made it for the iPhone, Android or one of those squeaky doggy phones. Who makes what for who is utterly irrelevant here – it’s still a total waste of time, just a pointless inclusion in the list of e-mail apps available for the iPhone. And that really I think is it. It’s just so they can tick ‘iPhone app store presence’ off the list and never have to think about it again or use it.
I could see what Argle Wargle was getting at. Android’s native Gmail app was the only thing on the platform, apart from possibly a bit more configurability, that I envied.