Speaking Of Shoddy iOS Apps…
Can someone please explain to me why on Earth the Gmail iOS app only features Push Notification badging? It’s infuriating.
Given that the app is basically just a wrapper around UIWebView, the only reason to get it is for Push Notifications. But what I want in a Push Notification is not the silly little red badge, I want a preview of the message itself so I can know whether or not I need to launch the actual app to take action on the message. Instead, the badge just means you have to launch the app every time to see what the message is.
For someone who gets a lot of email, it’s living hell.
Given their initial fuck up with the app (which was also a simple bug related to Push Notification — it’s clearly amateur hour over there), I can’t believe they would mess this up by accident. This seems like a conscious decision on Google’s part. But if that’s true, it’s one of the dumbest fucking decisions I’ve seen in some time.
The Facebook app fuck ups seem to be because they’re more interested in dicking around with HTML5 even though anyone with any taste knows building a fully native app is 100% better. One part of Google’s app fuck ups are similar. But at least I get that. These guys want to cut corners. Why spend time crafting a beautiful app when you can just add a nice layer of polish to a turd and shove it out the door? What I don’t get is the crippling of the most useful feature (Push) for no reason.
Put another way: It’s shit.
