Googler: "we pushed a bad version of our iOS app for Gmail" | Hacker News Reader

Googler: "we pushed a bad version of our iOS app for Gmail"

plus.google.com

85 pointsmmastrac69 comments

This response actually kind of scares me. Here's why.

1. No one has taken time to address the real issue—yes, there's a weird bug on launch, but the real issue is that the app itself blows. It's terrible. It's basically entirely a web view that runs even slower than the GMail webapp itself. As Scoble says in the comments: "The bar is high for apps. Make it better than a web page or DO NOT RELEASE! Please."

2. This an absurdly easy thing to check for. This has happened first with the Google Voice app, then with the Google+ app, now with the GMail app. Is Google committed to systematically destroying their own brand?

I think the UIWebView component that you can embed in native apps has slower performance than Safari.

I don't know the current situation, but for example Nitro was not available on UIWebView in iOS 4.3 ; also UIWebView does not do any caching by itself and doing it yourself is tricky. So this may explain why the performance of this GMail app is worse than the web app.

I understand why one would release native apps with web UIs. It's totally fine if you're on a budget. But the iPhone already has a perfectly fine email app and it also syncs well with your Google Apps account through its Exchange integration.

If an official GMail app is not better than the built-in functionality, then it's not only useless, but also affects their credibility.

Nitro is available in iOS 5.

Not in UIWebView for third-party apps, unless something has changed drastically. Nitro requires that the app be able to set the execute bit on arbitrary pages in memory. Third party apps can't be granted that privilege without essentially throwing the entire app approval process out the window.

UIWebView actually got slower in iOS 5: http://www.blaze.io/mobile/ios5-top10-performance-changes/

This an absurdly easy thing to check for. This has happened first with the Google Voice app, then with the Google+ app, now with the GMail app. Is Google committed to systematically destroying their own brand?

Isn't Apple destroying their brand with the original iPhone 4's crappy antenna and with the new iPhone 4's crappy battery life?

Bugs happen. It's software.

But where's Google's iOS record of success that should make us overlook this error? The Google Maps app is pretty good...

I don't have a source handy, but I'm pretty sure Maps.app for iOS was written in-house by Apple.

This is true. SJ talks about it in one of the Mossberg interviews, I think D8.

And the maps app on Android, written by Google, is superior in pretty much every way to its iOS counterpart. Even ignoring the navigation component.

I agree that Maps on Android is superior to Maps on iOS, just as native Gmail on Android is better than Gmail on iOS, but the parent was using iOS Maps as an example of a good Google iOS app – it isn't a good example because Google didn't write Maps for iOS.

It's not about whether Apple writes better iOS apps than Google does for Android, it's about whether Google makes any good apps for iOS.

Everyone seems to have missed my point, which was that Google has never created a good iOS app. Google Maps is the closest thing to a good iOS app that involves Google. So we have no reason to give them any slack on this; the way we forgave Apple for the iPhone 4 antenna.

Maps on iOS was written by Apple. They get their tiles from Google, but they wrote the client code.

Bugs happen. It's software

The OP isn't complaining about this bug. He's complaining of what appears to be a systemic problem both technically and in product design with Googles iOS apps. These issues can't just be hand waved away as easily as "It's software"

Right.

Bugs happen, always. And, of course, there are compromises you have to make to product, always, in order to ship.

What matters is where you draw the line. I'm sure that nobody will say that the antenna problem 'ruined' the iPhone. After all, it still launched, people still bought it, and all was well.

Three times now, for some reason, Google has * completely* ruined their launches. The Google Voice app, the Google+ app, and the GMail app all had easily caught, gamebreaking bugs that were so major that they required a full recall of the app.

For a tiny startup, this sort of launch-fumbling would be pretty bad. For an enormous company, it's almost laughable.

The new iPhone's battery life is nearly the same as the old one. What may cause issues (for some people) is the new version of iOS - whatever it is, the problem has something to do with the software configuration. It's not hitting all the users and it seems to be hitting some people with older phones (iPhone 3gs, iPhone 4) when they update.

Not to mention that these battery complaints surface every iPhone release. The reality is that safe and reliable Li-Ion charging is black magic. I'm pretty sure that brand-new lithium batteries don't reach their full charge capacity until they've gone through a few cycles, and/or the charge controller has 'learned' the attributes of that individual battery.

Every new iPhone I've bought -- and I've owned them all except the 3G -- has run down quickly the first couple of times I charged it, and every one has eventually achieved reasonable battery life after the break-in period. The 4S was no exception. Non-story, move on. It's unclear why Apple doesn't explain this.

Sure, part of that is just that you tend to use it a lot when something's new and shiny. But no, based on personal experience I'm pretty sure the issue is in software - some subset of the new features enabled by iOS5 is taking more juice than was expected.

I did discover one such issue. I have the New York Times app and access to a subscription for it. After updating to iOS5, the first time I tried to use the NYT app, it moved itself into the new "Newsstand" and changed its behavior so I started getting "alerts" whenever anything allegedly newsworthy happened. I had never gotten such alerts before, because I had that feature turned off. It was ridiculously hard to find the option to entirely turn off unattended polling related to the NYT app because the setting isn't where you'd expect it to be. (It's in Settings:Store)

(Apple has apparently identified some of the issues and just started beta-testing an update that is alleged to fix them.)

I think Google (along with many other companies) are systematically betting on the decline of native apps. And frankly, I'd prefer a webview app than no app at all

I prefer no app at all. For example, if you visit YouTube's mobile site on iOS, it has a neat little javascript animation that directs you on how to add it to your home screen. Once it's on the home screen, it feels like I'm opening an app. YouTube on Safari has a very app-like feel.

I don't really find that it's that bad of an app. It's not the most amazing app ever, but if you're a Gmail user, my initial impression on the iPhone 4S is that it's slicker and faster than the web version of Gmail (not a big bar to clear, but it clears it), and it has the one crucial feature which makes me an instant convert, which is that it's easy to view certain inboxes - namely, Important and Unread.

That alone makes it better than the native iPhone Mail application for me, since now I'm not going to get automated messages, newsgroup messages, etc., in my phone's main inbox.

So far I'm quite happy with it (I noticed the error on initial launch but ignored it - stupid mistake for Google to make, but didn't seem to affect my use of the application) and I'm kind of relieved it doesn't have push notifications, since I'm not sure I want them unless I can turn them off. Not so sure why everyone is piling on so hard.

Yes. The first version of G+ for iPhone was really appallingly bad.

In particular, it often blocked the main (UI) thread while waiting for data from the network, so it would hang for seconds at a time. Not doing that is pretty much application development 101.

I imagine the problem is that an iOS gmail client just isn't that high of a priority for Google. And why should it be?

In contrast, Android's gmail client is one of Android's biggest draws, and has never in my two years of using Android had a bad release. Instead it just keeps getting better.

Considering Google makes its money through selling advertising, of which GMail is a big part of that, I'd imagine having iOS users viewing GMail in an app that shows GMail's ads would be a priority for them.

Is google allowed to display its own ads in iphone? Just curious since I thought apple had some restrictions about them. I am honestly curious, I dont know a whole lot about this subject.

I hadn't considered that - but Twitter shows ads in Twitter, and since this is a web view - maybe?

Lots of iOS apps especially free apps have ads. Many are using Google ads network.

Except that the Android Gmail app doesn't show ads...

Google+ being released to Google App users - only for them to discover that Google+ app on Android and iOS isn't compatible for them.

Google Reader being released to universal complaints that it's made reading more difficult due to too much whitespace (a mistake that Gmail didn't make even though it uses the same design).

Gmail app being released and seemingly universally panned as being such a bad app, plus it's released with a major bug requiring the app to be pulled.

Since I actively use all three Google products, I'm a little more biased/sensitive to these mis-steps and may be making more of their mistakes than I should. But it seems to me that Google is really struggling to execute anything successfully these days. I can't decide if my expectations of Google has changed, whether Apple has caused me to have higher expectations on the release of a product, or if Google is genuinely stumbling - but my impression is that Google is making basic fundamental errors in the management of their products. Fragmented release dates alienating your loyal users, buggy releases and just outright bad design - to me, it seems like no-one is in control at Google - their work is becoming sloppy and I can only imagine that will hurt their brand in the long term if this isn't turned around.

Edit: Removed the 'over a year late' bit from the first line . Thanks to those who pointed that out - I actually did know it was released this year - I'm probably guilty of running on auto-pilot and inserted a 'cliched phrase' as I typed :S

A year late to Apps users? Google+ launched on June 28 of this year...

> Google+ being released over a year late to Google App users

I don't think Google+ launched a year ago.

Another post by a different Googler:

https://plus.google.com/102053381273068034374/posts/gc4Jj4wX...

" The iOS app we launched today contained a bug which broke notifications and caused you to see an error message when first opening the app. We’ve removed the app while we correct the problem, and we’re working to bring you a new version soon. In the meantime, everyone who’s already installed the app can continue to use it.

"We want to bring you a great Gmail experience, and we're sorry we messed up here."

The really annoying thing here is that Apple's process is broken. There is no way to test the binary that you submit to Apple before downloading it from the App Store.

Loopt had this problem a few times, despite an explicit item in our submission checklist to manually check the manifest file in a text editor. XCode often, but not always, messes this up - and in my experience - only for distribution builds.

haven't tries this, but would using a promo code work? I think they're valid for use before you make the app public

A stupid mistake by Google. Telling that Apple did not pick up on it in their famed testing process, though. Maybe they wanted to embarrass Google a little, but I assume we will never know.

Apple is not your personal QA department.

Not personal, but this isn’t something that should have made it through the review process. I’ve had a Mac app rejected for a far more minor offense (having a label in the preferences sometimes display incorrectly); an error alert on launch should not have made it past any reviewer.

Maybe Apple accepted it on purpose to discredit google and discourage usage. They are not a QA dept...

Really? Then why don't they let you install whatever apps you want on your device?

No. But they tend to be quite picky (more than end users, at least).

Crashing apps generally don't pass that review.

I'm not saying they should have covered for Google, of course. But it's a bit strange.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't kinda situation though - if they reject the app in this case it may create a PR problem for Apple, instead of just for GMail.

Deja vu, this happened when Google launched the Google Plus iOS app too:

http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/19/google-plus-iphone-app-lau...

Just what is going on at Google? The past few weeks (since and including the plus launch) have been a disaster for their brand within the tech community.

> The past few weeks (since and including the plus launch) have been a disaster for their brand within the tech community.

Why exactly? I love google+ and tons of hackers are using it too.

brador may be referring to the nym wars?

To me, the worst thing is that it preserves the strange scrolling lag of the web app. Also, it's really annoying that the only way to go from the folder selection/left column back to the mail view is to select a folder/inbox. In their similar layout, Facebook wisely lets you go back to the main column (the news feed) by tapping that column.

But, yeah, these apps are mediocre. Compare their search app with Dragon Go!, compare Google Plus with Facebook. Heck, Facebook's ancillary Messenger app blows away anything Google's put on any other platform. Why? Far smaller companies with far less talent are delivering far superior experiences on many platforms. The ability of these devices is so great and the tools have advanced so much that having apps of this caliber is like being the company with crappy web 1.0 website well into the 00's.

This should make the guy who left out the var during his product's launch feel better. No one is too big to fail.

It also broke my GV app notifications. As soon as I logged into Gmail iOS app, I started getting TXTS forwarded to my email (forwarding is OFF). I'm not sure if the 2 are related but thats the only change I made since morning.

Seems that Google has some QA issue for making series of similar mistakes. Appaling from a hugh company. I guess their app development process is similar to their web development, where for web any error can be quickly fix without much fanfare. Too bad they couldn't or did not stick a "beta" label onto their native apps.

Google: Here's our app to put on the AppStore

Apple Employee: thank you, we'll review it and put it up there

.. 2 days later ..

Apple Employee to Tim Cook: boss, this app is crashing a lot, but it's from Google. What should we do ?

Cook: publish it!

We've all done it.

I'm happy with the occasional step back when the pace of change is as fast and progressive as Google have accomplished this year.

Keep it up guys.

What's progressive about a thin wrapper around their existing web interface?

Keep it up guys.

Judging by their unfortunate string of broken iOS releases, they have been.

all iOS owners should use the Mail.app. it takes a little extra battery but Apple did it right...

They did not "do it right" if you're a heavy Gmail user. List of things that suck or are missing from the Mail.app Gmail experience (in no particular order):

1) 1-click archiving

2) stars

3) labels

4) priority inbox

5) aliases

6) spam marking

7) filtering

8) searching through message archives (messages not downloaded to iOS device)

9) drafts

10) proper conversation threading

There are probably a lot more. Those ones came to mind in <30 seconds.

I sincerely hope Sparrow for iOS will address these issues so that I can get push notifications without missing Gmail's best features.

Sparrow for iOS is something I have been looking forward to myself. I understand the issues you mentioned about Mail.app, but at least Push works if you setup Gmail as exchange.

I use Sparrow on the MBP and hope we get Sparrow iOS soon enough.

Confused. Wasn't MG Siegler telling us how much this app would rock?

Seriously though, why hype something one has never used? Egg on his face.

And it's not available on the Indian App Store :(

I didn't know Apple's App Store sold apps with bugs in them. Don't they have some type of review process?

This is a joke right? Since a bug can be a infinite loop and proving that you have no infinite loops in your program is uncomputable this would be an impossible task.

No. I remember reading a year or so ago about how tedious it was to submit an app to the Apple App Store, and how you also have to submit your source code or something.

I don't have an iPhone. I'm just going off what I've understood from iPhone users and developers over the years.

Apple isn't doing code reviews or regression testing, that's for sure.

The process is in place to make sure that your app is doing what it is supposed to do and is not using any private APIs and stuff like that.

You do not submit your code to Apple. They do run some automated scans on your binary for calls to undocumented API's, and they do run your app and check for certain issues that are important to Apple. It's an approval process, not a testing process.

Again, I haven't touched an iPhone in my life, but this was the reason I've heard apps in Apple's App Store is better than apps in Android's App Store. There could be other reasons, but I thought it had to do with Apple's involvement.

Keep downvoting me; I don't care. I'm asking honest (and I guess dumb) questions.

Don't believe everything you read on the Internet. Times two if its a blog post about a rejected app.

They definitely usually check if the app works as intended or not or at least they do for the Mac App Store.

Gmail on my Android works great though.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Tons of apps work great on my iPhone. Says more about the app than the phone. Sorry, I couldn't resist either.

And Apple apps work great on the iPhone. It's to be expected (unless a platform is absolutely horrible).

I actually think they could do a much better job with the gmail app on Android...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com