GPush: iPhone Push Notifications for Your Gmail Account
After a bit of a delay, the GPush app (iTunes link) has finally arrived in the App Store. GPush will send you a push notification whenever a new email arrives in your inbox. The app, which costs $0.99, does one thing and one thing only: it checks your Gmail account for new messages and sends out push notifications whenever it detects new messages. Just enter your credentials and forget that you ever installed the app.
According to the developers, GPush should work with regular gmail.com accounts as well as Google Apps email accounts. However, while we quickly started to receive push notifications from our Gmail account, we could not get push notifications from our Google Apps account to work yet. Some of our notifications arrived within seconds, though others took quite a few minutes to arrive. Hopefully, the developers will bring this lag under control over the next few days.
To Get the Most Out of the App, Set Up a New Gmail Account
It is important to note that while the app is extremely easy to use, it is also somewhat limited. You can't, for example, set up filters so that only certain emails will be pushed to the phone.
To bypass this limitation, we recommend that you set up an additional Gmail account and forward all the messages you want to be pushed to the iPhone to this account. This way, you can use Gmail's own filters to manage which messages you want to be notified of. As the app itself doesn't actually take you to the email client and works completely independent of the email accounts you have set up on your phone, it really doesn't matter which email account it checks.
Limitations: Only One Account, No Quiet Time
The app also supports only one email account, making it even more of a necessity to open up a separate email account just for push notifications.
Sadly, the developers didn't include a 'quiet time' setting, so messages will be pushed to the phone at all times.
Of course, Apple should simply include these notifications in the iPhone by default. However, for the time being, GPush is the best alternative to built-in email notifications, and given that it costs only $0.99, it's hard to say no to such a useful application that will surely be updated with new features over time.
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This looks really slick. I simply get enough e-mail most days that when I feel like checking, there's some waiting for me. :) Instant notifications would likely get tiresome.
That being said, Apple really needs to support native Gmail Push on the phone -- not so much for the notifications, but so the mail badge stays much more up-to-date.
I still prefer NuevaSync's push email service because they also offer push Google Calendar, Google Contacts, and Gmail. In my admittedly unscientific testing NuevaSync's service notified me of a new email quicker than GPush when I tried several test emails.
So hold on here... my iPhone already polls GMail via the native mail app and notifies me with a vibration when I have new mail... you want me to pay $.99 to have another 3rd app poll my GMail account and then push me a notification? Not to mention trust it with my GMail creds.
PEOPLE. THIS. IS. A. COMPLETE. WASTE. OF. MONEY.
Just to be clear... the only time a iphone push notification are useful are when they're powered by the content source.. in this case Google. If not, it's just polling and then pushing. AKA, useless in this case.
Jason - the problem is that Gmail on the iPhone only polls every 15 minutes and doesn't display an alert on your phone - just the vibration/sound.
With GPush you don't have to run down your battery to poll Gmail every 15 minutes and you get to see info about the sender and the subject. That's worth 99 cents, I think.
It's only .99 cents. It's not for everyone, but for a niche market. Not bad for the price I think.
Seems to be working at about 10% success rate for me today. Support must be inundated with requests as they're tweeting like crazy it is not a load issue. Hmmm, new service having issues, infrastructure not planned out very well.
The $.99 is better than polling every xx minutes. Now, if only it would WORK! Better still, why won't google push??
You need an app for that?! iPhone = old
I also liked nuevasync but you have to have a premium account ($25/year) for push gmail. I still wish there was an all in one solution from Google. They offer push contact and calendar support with Google Sync it just needs to support gmail. However, $0.99 for this program seems like a fine price point. You can spend less than a dollar now and not feel bad about switching when (if?) google finally supports push.
If you don't want to give your GMail password to a third party, and have a *bit* of programming knowledge, you can use my program for sending GMail push notifications to an iPhone. Uses Prowl to enable push.
http://github.com/parlarjb/prowl-jabberbots/tree/master
Posted by: jayparlar.com
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August 17, 2009 1:36 PM
This is really a nice post!
This gives relevant ideas and information about the new update on the new devices.
thanks for posting!
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Have you ever heard of PushMail? It is available in the App Store ($4.99, a bit expensive, I know) for more than 2 weeks now and it has worked flawlessly for me since then. And it works with all kinds of email accounts, not only Gmail. But still, that's certainly the best $5 I have spent on an app so far. Developer website is at http://dopushmail.com/.
I'd 2nd the recommendation for PushMail. It has worked from day 1 perfectly. Where as GPush still is not working for me.
10% success rate AT BEST. havent had one push notification work correctly. maybe first day issues, maybe not; but it does NOT work right now.
vt says "10% success rate AT BEST."
No kidding. GPush only worked for the first few minutes. The support is responsive but not very informative. I already regret having paid $1 for it. Too bad there is no way to request a refund on the App Store.
Would be great, if it actually worked...waiting for an update.
Doesn't work.
Another option for GMail Push on the IPhone is gPhushed (http://bit.ly/2XZhW)
There's a new application launching soon that solves many of the problems detailed in the article.
It allows you to check any label you like within Google Mail, not just all unread mails, so you can use GMail's excellent filtering system to decide what gets pushed.
It supports more than one account.
It lets you define 'quiet time' when notifications won't be sent, so your iPhone doesn't keep you awake all night.
It also supports notifications from Google Reader, Twitter and a number of other sources.
Best of all, it WORKS!
Check it out at http://www.ultimatenotifier.com