Google's Gmail App Returns to the iOS App Store – This Time it Works

Frederic Lardinois

Nov 16, 2011 — 1 min read

Google’s most high-profile failure of the last few weeks was definitely its Gmail app for iOS. The first version was such a bug-ridden mess that Google decided to pull it from the App Store within hours of its release. It’s not clear how the original app made it through Apple’s and Google’s quality tests, but today, Google finally brought the app back into the store. I’m happy to report that this time, it actually works as advertised.

Fixed: Images in HTML Messages

Besides the fact that the app actually really works this time, Google has also improved how the app handles HTML-formatted messages. In the first version, the rendering of HTML emails was atrocious, with images that didn’t fit on the screen. While today’s update doesn’t bring any new features, Google stresses that it did fix this problem.

Coming Soon: Better Notifications, Support for Multiple Accounts

Google’s announcement today doesn’t talk about what happened to the original app. Instead, the Gmail team clearly prefers to look forward and wants to talk about what’s coming in the next update. According to Google, support for multiple accounts and improved notifications will arrive in one of the next versions of the app.

It’s surprising that the app didn’t include these features from the beginning. Even though the major bugs are fixed now, the app still feels unnecessarily rushed. There was no real pressure on Google to get this app out, so why not wait until these features were ready?

If you still have the original app installed, the Gmail team recommends you sign out of the app and uninstall it before you install the new version. You can download the new version here.

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