Google has just updated their mobile app for iPhone to give push notifications for email and calendar. Now this has been a long awaited feature. Most of the users have been syncing their google calendar with iCal to get alarm notifications on their phone and mac. With new update, users can receive notifications for new Gmail messages and Google Calendar events right on the home screen. Google announced it yesterday and it covers the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Hosted domain mail works too, so Google Apps users arent left out.
Google Operating System says it seems Google only shows a badge on the icon when a new message comes in, so dont expect a full alert for mail. We will test it and let you know.
Till now the official route was Google Sync over Exchange, since Apple had only ever allowed MobileMe and Yahoo to do real push for web mail. The update also adds as you type answers for flight info, weather, stock quotes and currency conversion. No Google Voice alerts yet, that app has been sitting in the App Store review queue for over a year now. Its rolling out slowly, so keep checking the App Store. If you try it, tell us in the comments how the alerts behave on your phone. Stay tuned.
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: googlemobile.blogspot.com, macrumors.com, googlesystem.blogspot.com, fortune.com, silicon.co.uk.
