Another example of where I just had to wait.
I’ve wanted push GMail since I got my iPhone over a year ago. At first I forwarded email to my MobileMe account, and marked those messages as read, all using a filter in GMail. This worked well, but I started missing important email during the day, when sat at a computer (and not staring at my iPhone).
I didn’t renew my MobileMe subscription, because it’s so expensive, and I’ve built up a collection of free services to do MobileMe’s work (mostly from Google). The only missing piece was push email.
I tried using Yahoo, but they don’t push email that’s been forwarded from another account. I resisted paying for an app that may or may not work, mostly because it would end up taking a precious home screen spot on my iPhone’s springboard.
But finally!!! Google have accomplished what seemed to be impossible and added push mail to the Google Sync service. Hooray!
Except it isn’t working on my iPhone yet 🙁 ….. tum tee tum.
UPDATE: Email started appearing on my iPhone after a couple of hours, and push has worked well all day today. Hoorah!
Also, TUAW have an article with interesting detail about the challenges of implementing push. It seems to me that standards for pushing data across the Internet to clients, rather than relying on polling, need figuring out!
