Gmail push notification no longer works with Mail on new iOS devices | Hacker News Reader

Gmail push notification no longer works with Mail on new iOS devices

tuaw.com

36 pointsjosephby46 comments

I'm guessing iOS doesn't support the 16 year old and widely supported IMAP IDLE extension that provides push notifications? Because GMail does:

  mike@laptop:~$ openssl s_client -quiet -connect imap.gmail.com:993 -crlf
  depth=1 C = US, O = Google Inc, CN = Google Internet Authority
  verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
  verify return:0
  * OK Gimap ready for requests from 5.68.43.84 iz11if3450779wic.18
  1 LOGIN ********@googlemail.com ******************
  * CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UNSELECT IDLE NAMESPACE QUOTA ID XLIST CHILDREN X-GM-EXT-1 UIDPLUS COMPRESS=DEFLATE ENABLE MOVE CONDSTORE ESEARCH
  1 OK ********@googlemail.com **** **** authenticated (Success)
  2 EXAMINE INBOX
  * FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $Forwarded $label1 $MDNSent JunkRecorded $NotJunk NonJunk $Junk Junk)
  * OK [PERMANENTFLAGS ()] Flags permitted.
  * OK [UIDVALIDITY 596417035] UIDs valid.
  * 44 EXISTS
  * 0 RECENT
  * OK [UIDNEXT 548] Predicted next UID.
  * OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 25348]
  2 OK [READ-ONLY] INBOX selected. (Success)
  3 IDLE
  + idling

I'm pretty sure every desktop IMAP client supports it too. And K-9 Mail on my Android phone does too.

That requires a constant internet connection, which can be hard to come by on mobile devices.

Edit: Thanks folks. Looks like I was wrong about APN being pulled up over cellular messaging when there was data to transmit.

Well, seeing as I can only download the emails when I have an Internet connection, I'm happy to only be notified that there are new emails waiting when I have an Internet connection too...

[1] indicates the battery loss may be significant:

if you are using server-side filtering to filter emails into different folders and you want ‘push notifications’ and instant downloads for all of those folders, then there needs to be a separate TCP connection for each of those folders being monitored. On a mobile device, this can cause excessive battery usage if more than a few folders are being monitored.

[1] http://emailganizer.goodhumans.net/2012/10/01/activesync-pus...

I suspect IMAP IDLE is essentially identical to iOS push notifications. You connect, get a list of messages since the last time you were disconnected, then switch to an idle state where new notifications come in real time.

If the tcp session is severed, you have to reconnect, rinse and repeat with both IMAP IDLE and iOS push notifications.

I'm partly guessing here, but I'm not sure how it could work any other way.

Save for the Messages app, that is no different than any other push notification system available on the device. The Exchange protocol that Gmail was using up to this point essentially works the same way that IDLE does.

Correct. iOS does not support IDLE. IDLE requires a background process running continuously, which is not possible in iOS except in specific circumstances.

I believe one of those specific circumstances includes iOS's Mail.app when used with Yahoo mail. Why not with gmail?

Google could only provide push to iOS through Exchange, something they have to license from Microsoft. So, they're not doing that any more. As far as I can see, there actually aren't any license-free options available.

But you can use their Gmail app and still get push notifications.

Yes, I'm sure the license costs were killing them.

Wait wait, isn't Google an $80billion company with some of the top engineering talent on the planet?

Is this a patent issue or is it because no one else has figured out how to properly replicate that kind of functionality?

</ignorance>

> Is this a patent issue or is it because no one else has figured out how to properly replicate that kind of functionality?

No, the patent is an issue because of what the iOS Mail app supports for push.

Google has found out how to do it just fine on Android. But they don't control iOS. If you want a new system for e-mail pushing on iOS you need to be looking at Apple for innovation.

The article says you can pay for exchange support with gmail for business apps so I imagine it must be the license costs.

I've had terrible, terrible experiences with the gmail app's push notifications. It will literally push the same notification about the same email to me every 7-ish minutes for DAYS at time. It seems completely random about which email it chooses to get stuck on, and it doesn't help to mark the message read, delete it, or sacrifice a goat to google. There has been a thread going about it since last september, with hundreds of replies: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/x-AIvOGG...

I have experienced the same thing. My current fix is to kill the app and then hard restart the phone (I'm not sure that this actually fixes it, might just be the time it takes to restart).

Z-Push - http://z-push.sourceforge.net/soswp/ - implements ActiveSync (the Exchange protocol), and works with iOS devices as an Exchange provider.

I would be happy to switch from Mail.app to the Gmail iPhone app if someone at Google would (pretty please) implement an actual Mail.app alternative. I'm beyond certain that I'm not the only one here that has multiple Gmail-based email accounts. And they all get emails all the time.

The Gmail app may technically support multiple email accounts, but in reality, it doesn't. Without a unified inbox view, checking email is a chore and a real headache.

I also don't think this has much to do with Exchange licensing; the fact of the matter is, IMAP IDLE has existed for the better part of 16 years, and is the perfect push solution for email. Mail.app for the iPhone and OS X, along with countless other IMAP clients, (fully?) support IDLE - Gmail just needs to step up their game.

We don't need "Gmail apps". We need "IMAP clients"

iOS does not now, and never has, supported IDLE.

This makes me sad. The notifications that the Gmail app provides also show up for mails that are filtered outside the inbox. For example "junk" mails or social media notifications also show up even though they never reach my inbox but are filtered into labels. Another awesome point of the native notifications is that they disappear if you read the mail somewhere else, for example on your laptop. This helps prevent cluttering of the lock screen on iOS.

At least with the new folder based filtering they recently added to GMail, you can set it so messages apparing in any folder besides the inbox won't count toward the unread message count. This gets rid of all the non-inbox notifications when I use the GMail app on my iPhone.

That's great, thanks for the pro tip!

It should be noted that you can still get push notification support if you use Google's Gmail app on iOS.

The Gmail iPhone app has very reliable push functionalities and is way more extensive than its apple general mail counterpart.

Yes, but it doesn't let you combine multiple disparate (not all Gmail) inboxes into a single pane of glass like Mail.app does.

I found the gmail iphone app operates very poorly with a slow or spotty internet connection. It seems that google assume everyone is connected all the time with a fast connection. With the ios mail app it can download mail in the background slowly when it can and I'm able to read it offline.

Push notifications from the GMail app and Mailbox are not the same as what you get with Mail.app. With Mail.app, mail is downloaded in the background and immediately available when you launch the app. With the others, you launch the app and then stare at the screen for 5 - 10 seconds while mail is downloaded.

iOS 7 is adding a feature that will allow downloading data in the background and hopefully Mailbox and the GMail app will take advantage of that. But in the meantime: fetch, get Google Apps for $5/mo, or deal with the annoying wait

I agree that the push functionality seems to instantly notify you about incoming mail, however it doesn't seem to integrate as well with iOS. Have you been able to get email forwarding in other apps to use the Gmail app rather than trying to use Mail?

My default reply to these comments is "embrace, extend, extinguish".

P.S. Ironic that your nickname is "gnus" :) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnus)

This is an old news. Google announced[1] that a while back.

[1] http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=27169...

The logical way to implement these would be to have a single push channel in the mobile platform for all notifications. Messages send via this channel could then wake up an application on the mobile device to process the message and maybe perform some other actions. In order to save battery the incoming messages could be delayed a bit, grouped together and delivered in batch.

The push channel we already have on the platforms but I guess at least iOS and Windows Phone limit how it can be used for this kind of purposes.

To me the article treads frightfully close to conflating "push email" (being notified immediately when a message hits the inbox instead of polling at regular intervals) and "push notifications" (the medium of the actual notification). Thankfully it looks like the comment section here is able to tell them apart, but calling Exchange ActiveSync "push notifications" seems like either ignorance or pageview fishing.

Are there any alternative mail services that provide push notifications?

I've tried switching over to the Gmail app for a week and found it to be quite buggy. Badge counts would not be updated properly, emails would sometimes not load when you went into the detail view, etc. If it weren't for the clunkyness I wouldn't mind using it.

Any mail service provider that uses Exchange will work. They do exist, but I do not have any specific recommendations.

In practice, I do not find push mail to be all that important. Its real benefit, at least theoretically, is in optimization of battery usage by not having to constantly poll for messages, but I do not find it makes much difference on iOS and will perhaps become even less important on iOS 7 as background apps will be more apt to be firing up the radio anyway.

Mailbox.

http://www.mailboxapp.com

I liked Mailbox but for some reason, I think it drains my battery, much more than the Gmail app from Google..

I know it does not make sense that it's at background, not working and using the same push notification service as Gmail app.

Is there any logical explanation? Or is it just psychological?

Does this affect Mailbox users? I've only started using mailbox but I love it so far, and it let's me combine 2 gmail accounts into one app (which I think you can't do in the iOS gmail app?).

You can connect a dozen Gmail accounts in the native iOS Mail app if you like, with combined Inbox view or separate Inbox view, whichever you prefer.

From reading the other comments on here it seems like that option is broken because push doesn't work correctly with the iOS mail app? I'm just wondering if Mailbox's push works correctly, like the gmail app's push.

Why on Earth would you want to be notified about email?

Letting other people choose when you can be interrupted sounds awful.

Anyone know if this also affects syncing Calendars and Contacts?

Great so now we're forced to use the Gmail app?

Or Mailbox, I've grown fond of it recently.

No.

Nobody is forcing you do to anything.

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