Pushing gmail to your iPhone (without GPush)

As I told you some posts ago I bought GPush and struggled to make it work. At the end I started to be notified about incoming mail, although with some glitches from time to time. Now, very shortly after GPush was released, you don't need it anymore: Google Sync is now pushing mail to your iPhone.

This is really good news because now you can sync your mail, your calendar and your contacts with your iPhone. As I was already using Google Sync for contacts and calendars, setting up GMail push was really easy: just the flip of a switch!

If you haven't set up your Google Sync account on your iPhone, just follow the instructions on the Google Sync web site.

As far as I can tell, mail is pushed to the iPhone almost instantaneously. Nonetheless, there's a thing I'm not really happy about. I miss is a notification popup: no one is ever shown and the counter on the mail icon is the only information you're given when a mail is pushed:

I would expect a mail to be managed just like an SMS or even a phone call: checking periodically sort of defies the purpose of a push notification...

An update about GPush: it finally seems to work

If you're part of the club that wanted Google mail pushed onto your iPhone, the release of the GPush application did sound like good news. Unfortunately the application hasn't worked that well after its release and people started to complain. I was one of them: in this blog and directly to Tiverias Apps.

It was probably a scalability problem: they never tested an application with such a great number of users and GPush wasn't exactly the kind of application that passes unobserved. We were waiting for it! On its website support page Tiverias Apps has been constantly giving feedback to the users about the problems that we were experiencing. Finally I'm glad to state the following: GPush is working flawlessly for me since a couple of days.

There's some glitch, still, but I'm confident they will be resolved in a GPush application update. Specifically, I still can't change my account settings without uninstalling and reinstalling the application. It just ignores the change.

It was worth what I paid for it.

Update: You don't need GPush anymore if you want to have your google mail pushed to your iPhone.

Don't buy GPush (yet): it's not working

So happy was I, yesterday: I thought my emails were going to be pushed to my iPhone, thanks to GPush, something many users were waiting for.

Yesterday I bought the application and I had no problem configuring it. It's a pity that, since then, I just receive one (yes: one...) notification. After that, silence.

Tiverias Apps, GPush producers, states that they're experiencing problems with their servers and that their developers should have isolated the code paths which are causing the problems that we're experiencing. Just hope it's not a scalability issue: sending push notifications to a great number of GMail users seems no easy job to me.

If you feel like buying the app, please wait for these problems to be solved.

Update: GPush has started to work.

GPush: Gmail push notifications for the iPhone

It finally has come true. I wish it was an Apple supported feature, as I think it should be; even so, I'm glad that GPush has finally made it into the App Store.

Nowadays GPush has very basic features:

• It only lets you configure just one GMail or Google Apps account.
• You cannot define filters.
• The only way to stop incoming notifications is disabling GPush notifications in the iPhone control panel.

The first two issues are easily resolved by setting up an additional GMail account and configuring GPush to notify you about incoming mail in this account. Then, you can configure filters on the other account and forward to the GPush account only the mails you're interested in.

It's the first release and every software has its glitches. GPush is one thing I was really missing and I'm glad it's been deployed.