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Comment by HaloZero | Hacker News Reader

But the issue is the deep integration. If I choose to send an email in iOS, will it send me to this gmail app or will it to send me to Mail?

It's the same issue with Google Voice.

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It's an inherent issue with iOS, and one that would take a major update to solve (in other words, don't hold your breath until iOS6 or 7). Android solves it using a system of "Intents," where you basically just broadcast a message to the system saying, hey, I want to open this kind of file or do this kind of general action. Any app can register themselves as a receiver of a type of Intent. When there is a conflict (multiple apps can potentially handle the same Intent request) the user is given a small dialog window to choose what to open, along with an option to make that one the default.

Assuming enough of the OS X underpinning is still present in iOS, this would be trivial to implement--it's just a matter of Apple deciding to expose the event handling stuff in a public API. (I'm not sure how it works currently in OS X--last time I looked into it, it was still a descendant of the OS 9 "Internet" control panel, only without any UI at all....)

Intents is probably one of my single favorite under the hood features of Android as a user. Installing an app and having it instantly be able to exchange data with any other app on the system in a smart way makes the process so simple you don't really even have to think about it. It's one of the parts of Android I'd have a hard time living without.

It's also what makes the OS-level back button so important, which full-time iOS users seem not to understand when they cursorily try an Android phone. (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/10/31/android-hardware)

I agree with this thread that this is one of the best things about Android.

In fairness, I do agree with Gruber that back button behavior on Android can be painfully inconsistent. That said, I also agree with you that it provides fairly important functionality on Android. I do wish developers would use it more consistently.

Sure, that's a big issue. But it might not be as bad as it seems. The reason a native Gmail app is such great news is because of the special way in which we read and organize our Gmail accounts: Priority Inbox, tags rather than folders, stars, etc.

There will probably be nothing special about the native app's compose interface, though, so I don't see that it will be a problem to keep the account registered in both clients, but only to sync regularly with the native Gmail app, and to use whatever app iOS picks (undoubtedly MobileMail.app) when composing.

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