Google on Wednesday morning proudly unveiled a much-hyped native Gmail mobile application for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch only to have the application pulled from the App store within hours due to “a bug which broke notifications and caused users to see an error message when first opening the app,” according to a blog post from the company.
“We’ve removed the app while we correct the problem, and we’re working to bring you a new version soon,” wrote Google product manager Matthew Izatt in the post, “Everyone who’s already installed the app can continue to use it.”
That’s better than Apple pulling the app from the App Store due to a violation of its terms of service (as was reportedly the case with the Google Books app), but it’s still a misstep.
In the meantime, customers who haven’t gotten the new Gmail app will have to contend with the bare bones HTML 5 mobile version of Gmail that’s been available for iOS devices since 2009, which has been criticized by users as glitchy.
And tech bloggers were getting really excited about the native Gmail app too, with Tech Crunch’s MG Siegler breathlessly extolling the app’s new features – Push notification, threaded conversations, better search and priority message labels – on his personal blog before the app was available.
“A killer Gmail experience is something that Android users have long been able to hold over the heads of us iPhone users,” Sigeler wrote. “Not anymore. Pending approval, of course.”
Meanwhile, Google has begun rolling out a new desktop Gmail redesign for select users as part of its “GoMo” strategy to unify the design of all of its web services, specifically for mobile consumption.
That strategy too has had it’s share of hitches, as Siegler pointed out with a screengrab of a Google Blogs page that was not rendering properly for mobile.
Gmail is the third largest email client in the world with 260 million users as of October 2011, behind Yahoo Mail with 310 million users and Hotmail with 350 million users, CNET reported. However, Gmail is number two in the U.S. with 62.7 million active users behind Yahoo’s 96.6 million (Hotmail is in third place with 45.5 million).
Full disclosure: The author uses Gmail for the desktop and iPhone.
