One of the knocks against the iPhone has long been its lack of push email, a feature that is essential to many corporate users who live in their inboxes. It’s one of the major advantages that the BlackBerry has over the iPhone, especially for enterprise users, and even though the iPhone 3.0 software update added support for push notifications, Apple didn’t update the phone’s built-in email application with push.
Edit: As some commenters point out, push email has been available on the iPhone for other email providers, just not for Gmail
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A new 99-cent application from Tiverias Apps called GPush (iTunes link) aims to change that. Calling GPush simple would be an understatement – this app literally has a one-track mind. The only thing it does is provide push notifications for new emails in Gmail. It doesn’t open emails, or send emails, it just lets you know when new ones arrive, as soon as they arrive, and no matter what you’re doing.
Easy Set Up, But a Bit Flaky
GPush is extremely simple to set up: you just enter your Gmail username and password and that’s literally all there is to it (though you can also control sounds and alert permissions from the iPhone’s settings menu). GPush would definitely make Ron Popeil proud – you really can just set it and forget it. Unfortunately, in my testing today, I ran into some issues, and apparently I wasn’t the only one.
The app had two undesirable bugs in my testing. First, it would occasionally pop up alerts for old but unread emails. Second, it would sometimes miss new emails entirely. Resubmitting my account credentials would usually fix it for a bit, but missing emails is a rather egregious offense for an app that’s sole function is to push notifications of new messages.
Still, if they work the bugs out, GPush is certainly worth the 99 cents for anyone who needs to be kept in the loop on a more instant basis than the iPhone’s current fetch functionality offers. According to Tiverias, a premium version is coming that will support push for multiple Gmail accounts. We hope it also emulates some other BlackBerry features, such as notification profiles, so we could control when we get pushed alerts for email on specific accounts (or better yet, for specific filters).
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