Aug 18, 2009
We have a new entrant in the scene of enabling Push notifications for Gmail.
GPush from Tiverias Apps takes care of one issue and it takes care of it well. It offers Push notification for Gmail messages.
GPush iPhone app ($0.99) itself has very little in the app interface besides collecting your Gmail username and password. GPush works by alerting you of new Gmail messages with a red icon badge, a chime and an alert window that shows the sender name and the subject of the email.
In my testing, I successfully received Push notifications for my incoming mails. But, it wasn’t as fast as the other Gmail Push iPhone app we reviewed.
GPush uses SSL encryption to send your username/password to Google to authenticate and stores this information in their servers in an encrypted form.
These are reasonable security measures you would come to expect from an app that stores your information. But, I am not sure if this is enough for me to hand over my primary Gmail credentials which is an entry point to so many things online in my life.
PushMail is another Gmail push iPhone app we recently reviewed. It handles security a little differently where you need to forward all your emails to their push server and then you will get notified. That is another scary proposition but you can read the review details that at least it’s in your control as to what emails you forward. Plus, it can handle any webmail that can auto-forward emails.
GPush is a nice app that fills a void and I would definitely use it for a secondary Gmail account without hesitation for the price of $0.99. Plus, it doesn’t support multiple Gmail accounts yet. I hope to see more features like being able to turn off notifications at certain times (although that should be in the iPhone OS notifications from Apple), etc.
Update: Gmail Push is now officially out. Here’s a complete tutorial on how to setup push gmail on your iPhone! http://retwt.me/cvBq