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Comment by avree | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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 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...

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.

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.

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