Sparrow for iPhone

I've been waiting for a decent iOS Gmail client for so long. This is an excellent first release, far better than Google's own half-hearted attempt.

Let's hope they get some traction petitioning for an acceptable method to send push notifications: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3706993

To take the cynical standpoint, it's hardly in their best interests to make a first-class app for a competing platform.

Such are the vagaries of being a large corporation -- your various departments' goals become increasingly at odds with one another. The Android team wants their platform to be successful. Part of that means not releasing top-tier applications for competing platforms. Gmail wants their service to be successful. Part of that means releasing top-tier applications for as many platforms as possible.

It's clear, here, that Google places Gmail below Android in their list of priorities. I'm curious about which one of those departments earns more money, though, and which one is more strategically important for the long-term success of Google.

John Siracusa explains this same scenario as it appears to be happening at Apple extremely well in this episode of his fantastic podcast: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/8

This is worth the $3 just for the working search functionality and the ability to view your sent messages. The awesome UI is just a bonus.

I think the issue here is that it isn't really "push" they want to do. From what I can tell, they want to do is simply "run all the time so we can keep a connection open to receive new messages immediately". Which, to be fair, is pretty similar to what Apple does for their push notifications.

However, allowing this would be a bad move. It'd mean that rather than once centralized connection that knows about the device's network state and can (at least try to) preserver battery life, you'd then have as many as one per each app, always open. (Once Sparrow does this, then why could any other app not?)

The real issue here is that, from their responses, it seems that Google doesn't have some sort of authentication method like that could be used to get access to just enough information to pass the push data to Apple — or, at least, not one (like OAuth) that doesn't need them to remotely store a username and password. If there was a way for them to get some sort of useless "token" to get the notifications themselves and pass them to Apple, I don't think the security issues would be anywhere near as severe (especially if it was an opt-in service). But I don't know if Google does that, and their responses don't seem encouraging that something like this would be possible.