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Comment by esolyt | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't Google making an official Google Talk app for iOS again? Is it because of some limitations of the iOS or they just don't want to make one?

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They did, it got rejected & they created that thing instead

But there are many IM apps on the iOS App Store. Why was it rejected?

Can you have your own persistent TCP connections on iOS or are you required to use Apple Push Notifications? If not, that's probably why.

Doesn't Skype run in the bacground to receive calls and IMs?

Skype is a VoIP app and gets special privileges for that. It's just a plist entry of course, but apple is known to reject apps for claiming to be VoIP apps when they are in-fact not (like Sparrow - http://buzzingpixel.com/article/2012/03/sparrow-push).

Also, be mindful of what you ask for. Skype is a terrible battery drain. This could be because Skype just has some bugs or it could be because iOS relly sucks at dealing with background apps which would mean that GTalk would use as much battery as Skype.

GTalk's big feature is the voice/video chat, so I don't think a VoIP masquerade is the issue.

Why was it rejected? Apple.

Do you have any sources for this statement?

I was also wondering that. Because I remember a Googler saying they have never made a Google Talk app for iOS.

If they had, I would've been all over it. All existing Jabber/XMPP iOS apps are quite bad.

I can't find anything to support that. There was a native Google Voice app that was rejected (well, perma-delayed) but no native Google Talk app as far as I can tell.

This ain't true, at least for the original iOS Google chat solution. It was a deliberate bet to do it as a web app, instead of a native app. I was there and disagreed, but I still understood the willingness to make that bet.

there you go http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/27/apple-is-growing-rotten-to-...

Google Voice app was started later than the original web-based Google Chat for iOS project. The latter was already released and in use before Google Voice app was blocked. It wasn't made as a reaction to that dispute.

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