One reason Gmail for iOS still sucks

Not exactly.

To send from a different 'From' in Mail.app, first you need to connect your iPhone to additional email accounts (Settings->Mail). Then these addresses will show up in your 'From' drop down.

But then you end up with multiple inboxes in your Mail.app. Which is messy, fills up storage, and hurts my brain -- since I never need to check my other inboxes (because all my email addresses forward to the same Gmail account).

With the Gmail iPhone app, I just need to prove once (in gmail.com) that I have access to whatever 'From' addresss I want. Then I can select them in the Gmail app.

Note: I admit that the viewport issues discussed in the blog post are indeed an annoyance that I hope Google fixes soon. But I prefer Gmail app to Mail.app nonetheless.

Google Apps on my Android always were always one of the worst.

Google Maps - resource hungry, always doing something in the background, slow .. replaced them with much better, unfortunately local, alternative

Google Play - two examples: doesn't prevent phone from losing network so I have to play with the phone in order to download updates; listing my applications always takes about half a minute.. even if I did the same task 5 seconds ago

Google+ - basically unusable, unbearably slow, doing stuff in background all the time, crashed whole system few times

The truth is I don't have the most modern phone, but it isn't the slowest either (it's single core 900MHz w/ 512MB ram). It's running on the latest available android for that device (the device was sold less then a year ago, it's from 2010). Can't imagine how those apps run on older/slower phones.

Side note: Another multi-billion dollar company that can't seem to produce working android application is facebook. That is the single worst application that I have ever used (some were worse (google+), but I can't really talk about "usage" with them). It's getting slowly better, but it's still a crap. Twitter on the other hand is great.

Agreed. I use K9 instead of Gmail. Better in every single way.

What do you use instead of Maps?

I don't use Google+ or Facebook. Thank god for disabling applications. (I'm referring to the ones that are locked to your phone and cannot be uninstalled).

I love the app, but there is one thing I'd change to perfect it, because I'm a heavy label user:

When choosing a label, there's no immediate visual feedback to show which label you've selected. This might not sound critical, but using a finger on a moving train can lead to inaccurate pressing! Compare that to the web interface: select a label, and there's immediate feedback saying "this conversation has been moved to/labelled "whatever_the_label_is".

I'd like to either see my selection invert, or a confirmation similar to the web interface.

(And agree with the OP: taking up valuable screen space with a thick border is inefficient).

I love in particular that the list is sorted in an alphabetical order. It is not exclusive to the Gmail.app for iOS but in the web GUI, it wasn't available a few months ago. If you added an additional mail addresse, the order within your address list sometimes even changed.

I would of course still prefer if I could define the list order (as in Mail.app for iOS and OS X) but an alphabetical order is still better than a more or less random order … :)