Google Adds Push Notifications To Mobile App For iPhone

Google has given its Mobile App for the iPhone a makeover, so that it will now push notifications from Gmail and Google Calendar onto the Apple handset.

Also included are pop-up calendar reminders appearing on the user’s home-screen, and a Gmail icon badge that notes new email. The app is available in Apple’s App Store.

“We’ve also added spiffy features to get you information faster – when looking for flight info, weather, stock quotes or currency conversion you’ll see answers before you hit ‘Search,’” David Singleton, a Google engineering manager, wrote in an 23 August posting on the Google Mobile Blog.

No Gmail Pop-ups

In comments below the posting, users seemed to lament the lack of pop-up notifications for new Gmail messages. “If there is no pop-up for email notifications, there really is no point to this app,” one wrote. “I get badge updates on the native mail app already.”

For some users, however, the new icon badge could assist them in keeping their Gmail entirely separate from their other email interfaces – something not possible if Gmail is filtered, along with other email accounts, through the iPhone’s native email app.

Fierce Battle

The tighter integration between Google’s key mobile services and Apple’s smartphone platform seems a minor irony, considering how fiercely the two companies are battling for mind- and market-share. According to estimates, some 200,000 Android-equipped smartphones ship per day; for its part, Apple managed to sell some 1.7 million iPhone 4 units during the device’s first weekend of release, and claims that demand still runs high.

Research firm Gartner recently estimated the market for mobile apps at $6.2 billion (£4 billion) in 2010, a tempting honey-pot for both companies. Earlier in August, reports emerged that Google was negotiating with PayPal over letting Android users pay for their mobile apps via the service. Meanwhile, Apple reportedly hired an expert in near-field communication (NFC) technology as its new product manager in mobile commerce.

The mobile competition has expanded to other areas, as well, with Apple’s iAd mobile-advertising platform squaring off against Google and AdMob. According to data from Millennial Media, an independent mobile ad platform, more than 55 percent of July’s total mobile ad impressions went to the iPhone, while Android took 19 percent. That was good enough to power Android past Research In Motion’s BlackBerry at 16 percent.

Meanwhile, a new research note from Shaw Wu at Kaufman Bros. suggests that Apple is negotiating with Verizon over porting the iPhone onto the carrier, in order to blunt Android’s momentum: “What better way to do that than where Android has seen the majority of its success?”