A few hours ago, Google finally delivered an iOS app for Gmail. Long overdue, its release was supposed to revolutionize how iPhone users access the service. Instead, some users seem under-impressed with the app’s feature set, and the presence of an annoying bug has forced Google to already withdrawal the app from Apple’s App Store. What went wrong?
The most pronounced problem with the app, the one that caused Google to halt its distribution, is its broken support for notifications. Beyond notifications simply not working, the app spits out an error message about the problem when it starts up. It’s such a glaring issue, it’s raising plenty of questions about how the app even got approved in the first place.
Even if notifications worked as expected, reactions to the app have been decidedly mixed. There are some absent features, like the ability to support multiple Gmail accounts, but the larger issue seems to be that it doesn’t feel like enough an improvement over the mobile web version of the Gmail site.
Google’s working now to correct the notifications problem and get the app re-released. If you managed to try it before it was pulled, notification-issue aside, what did you think?
