After a bit of a delay, the GPush app (iTunes link) has finally arrived in the App Store. GPush will send you a push notification whenever a new email arrives in your inbox. The app, which costs $0.99, does one thing and one thing only: it checks your Gmail account for new messages and sends out push notifications whenever it detects new messages. Just enter your credentials and forget that you ever installed the app.
According to the developers, GPush should work with regular gmail.com accounts as well as Google Apps email accounts. However, while we quickly started to receive push notifications from our Gmail account, we could not get push notifications from our Google Apps account to work yet. Some of our notifications arrived within seconds, though others took quite a few minutes to arrive. Hopefully, the developers will bring this lag under control over the next few days.
To Get the Most Out of the App, Set Up a New Gmail Account
It is important to note that while the app is extremely easy to use, it is also somewhat limited. You can’t, for example, set up filters so that only certain emails will be pushed to the phone.
To bypass this limitation, we recommend that you set up an additional Gmail account and forward all the messages you want to be pushed to the iPhone to this account. This way, you can use Gmail’s own filters to manage which messages you want to be notified of. As the app itself doesn’t actually take you to the email client and works completely independent of the email accounts you have set up on your phone, it really doesn’t matter which email account it checks.
Limitations: Only One Account, No Quiet Time
The app also supports only one email account, making it even more of a necessity to open up a separate email account just for push notifications.
Sadly, the developers didn’t include a ‘quiet time’ setting, so messages will be pushed to the phone at all times.
Of course, Apple should simply include these notifications in the iPhone by default. However, for the time being, GPush is the best alternative to built-in email notifications, and given that it costs only $0.99, it’s hard to say no to such a useful application that will surely be updated with new features over time.
