It has now been over a month since we first wrote about GPush, an iPhone app that uses Apple’s Push Notification system to alert you when you have new Gmail messages. Like so many other apps, it was starting to look like Apple simply may not accept it. But a surprise came to developers last night: An email from Apple accepting the app.
Now, before you get all excited, it’s not live just yet. The developers had an issue with the Amazon servers they use to run their system, so they temporarily took the app down, but the team expects things to be back to normal and the app to be in the store in the next 24 hours, we’re told. Again, as far as Apple is concerned, the app is good to go.
If you need to know about the app itself, I suggest you read our initial piece, but it’s pretty straightforward, it brings push support to Gmail on the iPhone via Push Notifications because Apple doesn’t support push Gmail natively, for whatever reason. What we’re more interested in is the timing of this acceptance.
Granted, this is all speculative, but the timing of Apple accepting a Gmail push notification app that it has been sitting on for a month is curious. Earlier this week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down from Apple’s board of directors. A few days prior to that, the FCC sent letters to both Apple and Google inquiring about the their relationship as it relates to the App Store. This was brought about by Apple rejecting Google’s Google Voice app. And then yesterday, we reported that Google and Apple did have a no-poaching rule for hiring between the two companies, something which the Justice Department was looking into.
Could all that pressure, specifically on Apple as it relates to Google, have caused Apple to accept this app? Or, at the very least, did Schmidt’s removal from Apple’s board pave the way for this? The developers are wondering the same things. Sure, it may sound silly that Apple’s stance on one app could be changed by these things, but we do know that Apple has started watching even single app rejections/non-approvals more closely as no less than Apple VP Phil Schiller is now weighing in on them.
Or maybe this is the first sign of a thaw for Apple’s frigid policies with developers who create apps in what it considers to be a gray area. I’m not saying GPush was definitely one of those apps (though we did wonder that from day one), but a month is a long time to wait for approval, even by the App Store’s standards. And the GPush developers say that they did not change anything in the app to make Apple accept it.
Whatever the reason for the acceptance, if you’re a Gmail addict, it will be a good thing to have GPush in the store. As I said, look for the app sometime in the next 24 hours in the App Store. It will be $0.99 for the first week of availability, then the price will go up to $1.99.
[photo: flickr/richard stebbing]
Well hopefully Apple is learning its lesson with all this attention to its app approving process.
Just STFU about the damn App Store.
One minute you love it, the next minute you hate it.
Please, just go back to sucking up to the “Crunchpad.” lol
Do you have a state to run? Oh wait…
In all seriousness do you need to see a doctor for compulsive disorder ?.
You seem to pick a subject and run every stories on every angle possible, just like you did with twitter your now doing with the App store.
youbetcha! in fact, pretty soon, 52!
Power of google… Google is the new don of Tech world.
What could be really interesting is how this might work for Google Voice. Since GV is now going to be a web app, the killer feature is free SMS. But without push it’s not such a great feature, and how would Google make a web app use push?
But perhaps now a third party could create a Gpush-like app that would send you a push message when you get an SMS message to your GV number? Or Gpush itself could be updated with this feature?
Then it would get interesting. An app like that wouldn’t be duplicating existing features on the iPhone would it? So what excuse could Apple give for rejecting it?
Good thoughts.
+1
Exactly. GPush already is duplicating a core feature of the iPhone—mail—but Apple doesn’t care because they don’t make any money from email.
But, I could see this app acting as a portal to retrieve your GV SMS messages too.
Don’t have gpush but is it really duplicating email? Or does it alert you that you have email? That’s why a push app for gv SMS should be ok. It’s not an SMS app. It just a notification app.
Good point. The notification app could link to their WebApp to read and respond to the SMS.
“it is technologically too advanced, so that it may confuse users. please dumb down your app”
It’s about time.
I used to work for Apple’s marketing team and I never did like the way they treated developers.
If Apple really wants to increase their profitability, they would allow these apps to make it and learn from them.
Much like how I learn from other people when I am developing apps. I look at them and think to myself… “What could I do differently?” and “How can I improve this?”
“If Apple really wants to increase their profitability”
Because, you know, Apple isn’t already the most profitable tech/CE company with the highest margins out there.
And, of course, Apple isn’t ever thinking about “How can I improve this?” Because, you know, they are so stupid. They really should just hire you and be done with it.
But see, they ALREADY hired him.
All these manufacturers want to be so unique and special – they just end up shooting themselves in the foot – that’s all.
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Hopefully Gmail integrates Google Latitude into Gmail. Open Gmail and it updates your location and if a friend is close by u receive an email.
I use & open Gmail 50 times a day!
Well, Apple accepted in the AppStore my PushMail app (Gmail oriented) more than one week ago. That would have been difficult for them not to accept Gpush!
Simon,
Great app, really. For those of you who haven’t had the benefit of using “Pushmail,” it’s a deal at $4.99. Beats the heck out of paying $99/yr for mobile me. The email isn’t fast, it’s almost instant. Don’t confuse this app with the cheap non-working knock-off from the Czech republic(Codesign.cz) Correct, it’s not push, but mor like an instant notifier- the benefit is that a duplicate email does not exist so you don’t have to constantly re-delete emails on another server. Congrats and cheers! thanks for this app
Personally, I’d be very uncomfortable about using this app.
I assume my Gmail username and password are sent to the company’s servers (hosted on Amazon EC2, I guess). The server stores those passwords and uses them to keep an IMAP IDLE connection open to Gmail. Gmail sends an event to the server when a new mail arrives. The server can then kick off an iPhone alert via the Apple Push Notification Service.
This is a very simple system but depends on a company I have never heard of having my GMail credentials. Not good.
I built a proof-of-concept using Python’s imaplib2 module and a python APNS in about an hour. I feel much better running this on my own desktop. I’ll put the code on github tonight.
I don’t understand why Google hasn’t implemented this themselves as soon as APNS became available in iPhone OS 3.0.
There’s another app already available that doesn’t use your credentials. You have to setup a forward from your Gmail to an email address they give you, and then it Pushes the notification to your phone after they receive the forward.
Haven’t tried it, but sounds very interesting:
http://itunes.a...271854&mt=8
Sounds interesting. Looking forward to seeing some code.
Here is the code of the proof-of-concept demo
http://github.c...ail-iphone-push
You’ll need an iPhone dev account to run this. The interesting bits are in server/server.py. You can find a little more info on my blog or in the README.txt file in git.
http://blog.nin...-on-iphone.html
Hi Gunnar,
I have tried this app and it does work beautifully, themails are not forwarded, but an instant notification is sent. Please remember, very few of us, including myself don’t know the first thing about using “code.” The Pushmail app is just about foolproof. Does the iphone need to be jailbroken to use this code? Pushmail does not require any jailbreaking or extensive programming knowledge. If you knew how to do thi all along, where Have you been? we need more apps like this, keep them coming
I love Google and hate Apple. Why? Because google allows everything for free. And Apple always wants to milk you. Now why is that?
really? ok… enjoy windows 7 ultimate edition.
Not sure about it.Hopefully it will come.
Well, the difference between GV and Gpush is that the latter does not put the carriers (AT&T) at stack…
Couldn’t that be a reason for approval?
*at stake.. sorry for the typo
sure, no doubt there is a difference between those two situations, but apple has been pretty finicky about which apps it approves that have functionality that it does (or should) offer, like push Gmail.
if there is anything to learn about apple and how it approves apps for the app store it is that it is not about apple – it’s about the human being you are stuck with inside apple that is responsible for reviewing your app. in other words, its complete hit or miss.
if i were a developer, i would not be wasting time on the illusion of apple providing me a platform for potential eyeballs if i were building anything compelling to use at all. because, chances are, you are testing one boundary or another in terms of what is acceptable
Apple is running scared. The FCC investigation threat got them thinking… too late though because the investigation is still going to happen.
As someone else posted here, Google *is* the new Don of the Internet – and Apple has become the new Microsoft.
It keep crashing on me too and it make my Windows 95 OS funky.
dude that’s not only wrong thread, it’s wrong century
very excited to see exactly which features of the greater google are able to integrate into this. If they get this gpush pipeline going it could very well be a fantastic backdoor for tons of other apps. what i would love to see are…
latitude requests and auto update via auto respond settings
collaboration notifications on google docs
GVoice alerts (sms, voicemail etc)
event and calendar notifications
and of course google talk
every single one of those things could be possible overnight given the right environment. here’s hoping =)
Apple should charge a $99 fee for each new app submission. That would eliminate the thousands of useless apps that are submitted daily and maybe the approval time will improve to something reasonable like a few days instead of weeks!
Finally! Now I just gotta figure-out how to have my the Text Messages sent to my GoogleVoice number converted into an email to let me know it arrived. Oh wait, just bring back GV Mobile!
I’m not so sure that a month is a long time to make it through the approval process. My App Engine Manager application (see http://www.babi...hone/index.html) took 4 months to make it through. I submitted it at the end of March, it didn’t make it onto the App Store until the end of July.
This isn’t really that big of a surprise. Email is not exactly a part where Apple competes. I don’t think Apple really cares about Google having push notification on the iPhone – and I doubt the rejection of the Google Voice app had any bearing on the acceptance on this app.
I’ll believe in the app store thaw when my own not-possibly-offensive (to people, devices or networks) and strictly-adhering-to-public-APIs app gets out of its 39 days of app review purgatory.
Since developers are reporting approvals in as little as 10-14 days, this is clearly Apple up to something, not Apple overworked.
Time has changed. Apple is forbidding iPhone users to install Google Voice app on the device. They decided to take it off App Store. Why? Just because.
This smart phone is essentially a computer with operating system and an ability to install third party software like any other computer. When I called Apple, tech support representative informed me that Apple does not have to explain why they are forbidding me to install Google apps after I purchased device planning to use it with Google Voice. She also informed me that App Store is like any other store has right to choose what they put on their shelves.
Well, I respect their choice, but the last time I checked in my neighborhood mall none of their stores are FORBIDING me to use products from anywhere else but from their store. Does Apple respect my choice? Communist China government did not dare to make Lenovo give me a list of software I can install on my laptop. Lenovo respects my choice because they know what will happen with their laptops if they would try to deny this choice to people in free world.
Just imagine what would happen if Microsoft make an agreement with Comcast and set up a list of software you are allowed to install. What if they allow you to connect to internet only through Comcast? What if Comcast decides they not like some software and a week later Microsoft would FORBID using it without any meaningful explanation? That would definitely be considered mafia-like behavior and nobody would tolerate it.
We are not tolerating this behavior neither from China, US government, Microsoft, nor from Comcast. For how long are we going to tolerate this behavior from Apple? I erased my iPhone, I smashed it with hammer and I will send it on Monday to Steve Jobs, c/o Apple 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino, CA 95014
Time has changed.
The Fascists at Apple ALLOW you access to something. Anyone who owns an iPhone is an idiot.
Geez, I’ve had Push for my GMail for months without this. NuevaSync set this up probably a year ago. They use an Exchange type server system and you register your GMail account, and it notifies you and downloads your mail to your iPhone.
People, this is NOT news.
They didn’t have to bother with the whole App Store process either. You register once on their website and you’re done. Stop waiting for “apps to do that” and use the existing solutions that are already there. Reinventing the wheel is ludicrous.
Nuevasync charges $25/year for this service. You can get google calender/contact sync for free and Pushmail is available at the app store for a one time fee of $4.99- and the notifications for new emails are instant ! nothing against nuevasync but they already lose on a cost basis.
So an app that supports push notifications was supposedly approved (not yet on the app store) and now TC is declaring an App Store thaw?
Oh, Please.
Great idea on the pricing scheme.
Hm, I can’t even have my “fetch new mail” on because of poor battery life. Is this REALLY a beneficial app?
Or are we all going to congratulate Apple for being so open, and then realize we can’t use it anyway?