Sparrow for iPhone

by _frog • 14 years ago

147 100 14 years ago

bgentry3• 14 years ago

I've been waiting for a decent iOS Gmail client for so long. This is an excellent first release, far better than Google's own half-hearted attempt.

Let's hope they get some traction petitioning for an acceptable method to send push notifications: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3706993

Xuzz3• 14 years ago

I think the issue here is that it isn't really "push" they want to do. From what I can tell, they want to do is simply "run all the time so we can keep a connection open to receive new messages immediately". Which, to be fair, is pretty similar to what Apple does for their push notifications.

However, allowing this would be a bad move. It'd mean that rather than once centralized connection that knows about the device's network state and can (at least try to) preserver battery life, you'd then have as many as one per each app, always open. (Once Sparrow does this, then why could any other app not?)

The real issue here is that, from their responses, it seems that Google doesn't have some sort of authentication method like that could be used to get access to just enough information to pass the push data to Apple — or, at least, not one (like OAuth) that doesn't need them to remotely store a username and password. If there was a way for them to get some sort of useless "token" to get the notifications themselves and pass them to Apple, I don't think the security issues would be anywhere near as severe (especially if it was an opt-in service). But I don't know if Google does that, and their responses don't seem encouraging that something like this would be possible.

bgentry3• 14 years ago

If there was a way for them to get some sort of useless "token" to get the notifications themselves and pass them to Apple, I don't think the security issues would be anywhere near as severe (especially if it was an opt-in service).

Good point, that would be a much better solution. All they'd need is a web hook to let them know when there is new email for an account. They could use that to send a push notification with the correct badge count for unread messages.

That's what we should really be petitioning for.

aaronblohowiak• 14 years ago

google has an OAuth extension to IMAP for gmail https://developers.google.com/google-apps/gmail/oauth_overvi...

mike-cardwell8• 14 years ago

Re push, I use an IMAP client called K-9 Mail on Android which has support for IMAP IDLE, which is basically the IMAP version of push. It keeps a constant connection open to my IMAP server and is immediately informed of any new mail. I have not noticed any reduction in battery performance since moving from 15 minute polls. I still get 1.5 to 2 days use out of it (HTC Desire Z).

There's nothing inherently wrong with this on mobile devices. If Apple can't do it for iOS, that is a flaw in their design, or their thinking.

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

I don't understand that page at all. It doesn't explain why the app was rejected or why they can't use the native iOS pushing. In fact, I'm quite unsure of what is unique about their use-case for push notifications that is different than... any other similar task in iOS.

Pheter2• 14 years ago

The iOS push notification service works by having a remote server determine when a push notification needs to be displayed to the user. The only way for Sparrow to do this would be to store the gmail credentials of every user who uses their application on a server (instead of each individual users iPhone). This would obviously introduce a lot of security considerations that Sparrow don't want to have to deal with.

Alternatively, Apple provide an API that certain apps may use to regular check for updates by running code on the iPhone, but Apple are not allowing Sparrow to use this API.

pablasso• 14 years ago

I can't get into my head why Google, with so many resources, can't a least do something like Sparrow for iOS.

_frog2• 14 years ago

To take the cynical standpoint, it's hardly in their best interests to make a first-class app for a competing platform.

tomkr3• 14 years ago

Why not? If Google gives me a crappy mail app on my iPhone I am definitely not switching to Android. On the other hand, if it is high quality I may actually be tempted to switch.

guywithabike• 14 years ago

Such are the vagaries of being a large corporation -- your various departments' goals become increasingly at odds with one another. The Android team wants their platform to be successful. Part of that means not releasing top-tier applications for competing platforms. Gmail wants their service to be successful. Part of that means releasing top-tier applications for as many platforms as possible.

It's clear, here, that Google places Gmail below Android in their list of priorities. I'm curious about which one of those departments earns more money, though, and which one is more strategically important for the long-term success of Google.

John Siracusa explains this same scenario as it appears to be happening at Apple extremely well in this episode of his fantastic podcast: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/8

stuartmemo• 14 years ago

Might not be everyone's cup of tea, but the gmail mobile web app is actually pretty great.

yangez• 14 years ago

This is worth the $3 just for the working search functionality and the ability to view your sent messages. The awesome UI is just a bonus.

phil• 14 years ago

Tiny swipable page indicator in the nav bar title: awesome.

Replacing swipe-to-delete on a message with back/pop: not so good.

It's really nicely done overall. Totally rethought from their desktop app.

veidr• 14 years ago

Wow, this looks like a really good IMAP client for the phone. A major limitation of the built-in iOS Mail app is that it has no facility to combine sent/received mail into one conversation view (unlike Mail on the Mac).

Sparrow also features a nice polished UI, and is responsive.

3-minutes-of-use verdict: GOOD

Dramatize• 14 years ago

Bought it as soon as it was available. Their OSX app was one of the first I bought when switching to Mac.

switz• 14 years ago

I truly appreciate their caution in storing my personal information on their servers, but unfortunately it's just not practical to use until there is proper push. Hopefully Apple hears their pleas and allow it. This app looks gorgeous.

nodesocket• 14 years ago

Just download and paid for the OSX app. It's really nice, love the unified inbox, pulls labels from gMail, and also you can create e-mail alias like (sales, support) and send from those alias. Highly recommended.

dwynings2• 14 years ago

I've been a beta tester of their iPhone app for over a month now, and while the UI is stellar, I still haven't found it to be a replacement for Apple's Mail app because of Sparrow's lack of push.

_frog2• 14 years ago

On top of that there's no way to set it as the default system mail client, otherwise a fantastic app.

farslan• 14 years ago

Unless Apple change his policy about Push (API) there is little Sparrow can do. Spaarrow is aware of this. They have a page dedicated to this Push problem:

http://sparrowmailapp.com/push.php

vpdn• 14 years ago

There's something that they can do, it's written as the first option:

"On our side: if Sparrow was to do Push today, we would have to store your credentials (login/password) on our servers to frequently poll your accounts, and send you notifications.

This is a responsibility we're not ready to take. As a startup focused on iOS/OS X development, we do not have the skills to secure your data on our servers and we do not want to put sensitive information at risk."

wattjustin2• 14 years ago

I've been a beta tester for the last month or so as well and I can definitely say this has replaced Mail.app for me. I feel relieved not seeing the red notification bubble growing. It's been freeing and I've got a much better way of managing my emails now. I hope Apple comes around on notifications though so this app will be even more popular(already broken the top 25 paid apps here in Canada.)

lovskogen• 14 years ago

You easily remove that red dot badge, for all the apps you want – in Notification Center.

dwynings2• 14 years ago

I can appreciate how some would benefit from that.

zschallz• 14 years ago

I'm becoming very irritated with Apple's behavior in the app store. While it's nothing new, I hate that they're restricting apps that compete with native apps.

Sparrow? No push notifications for you. Dolphin? Here's an NC17 rating (wtf?) for you, and by the way-- no way to change the default browser.

I'd really like to see a reasonable explanation for both of these scenarios by Apple. My guess is the only reasonable explanation is that they want to restrict and "protect" the user experience for that critical functionality in a way that seems like an ornery chef who refuses to cook your steak medium well.

Xuzz3• 14 years ago

I tried to explain it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3707183

More condensed, it's a combination of Apple not wanting each app re-implementing push (or constant polling), Sparrow not willing to take on the responsibility of being able to access your email, and Google not providing low-privileges access for Sparrow to only be able to see the little amount of data that push needs.

Terretta2• 14 years ago

Apple's happy to let Sparrow use push. Sparrow didn't want to use push, they want to poll. Allowing that would be good for time-pressed or unskilled devs, but bad for users.

Sparrow admittedly doesn't want to figure out how to do push securely. But look at the fantastic PushMail app (dopushmail.com) to see a beautiful push implementation. Apple's not blocking push.

// Too bad about dopushmail.com having to stop selling the app. That leaves an opportunity for someone...

ivanstojic3• 14 years ago

I have several (breaking) issues with the paid desktop version of the Sparrow.app. I've posted the most bothersome one on their support forums about two weeks ago: no reply at all. Nothing.

As a company that does epic UI, they should figure out that customer support is a form of user interface as well.

I'm not ready to give them any more money at this point.

sleepyhead2• 14 years ago

I had severe issues too with the Mac app too, like lost email drafts. The problem is that email is difficult to handle. Sparrow does an excellent job with the UI and while that part was ready for a 1.0 release the email handling was not. It takes a lot of manual testing due to the way other email applications and servers abuses email standards. They released it to early for it to be labeled stable IMHO. The current release is decent though, but still found bugs and it has been a while since the latest update (they must have put all resources on the iPhone-app). Hopefully they haven't done the same mistakes with the iPhone-app. Looks great with my limited testing so far and I have replaced my main Mail-icon on my home screen.

freshfey• 14 years ago

Same thing happened to me. To be fair though, I had issues with the app around a year ago and they promptly answered. It seems like they are a bit swamped with support issues now.

ivanstojic3• 14 years ago

"swamped ... now" might be an understatement. From the looks of their support page (https://sparrowmail.tenderapp.com/discussions/questions) - the last reply actually made by sparrow support was on December 8.

joelg872• 14 years ago

I can say from my experience so far with Buffer, that it is easy for this to get very hard to keep up with. Seems like they had similar great intentions like us to be amazing at support as well as build a fantastic product. We had a period where our support response time lagged as we reached a certain scale. We've since hired a freelancer for a few hours a day to help us and that's really transformed things to the point where we're better at support than we've ever been, and at the same time we can focus on what each of us in the rest of the team is good at. Whilst the freelancer does a lot, we dip into support every so often and have things assigned to us, so we're always in contact and understand customer problems, which I think is very important.

We used UserVoice for a while and were responsive, then as we scaled we found it hard to keep up with, and ended up good at our email channel but bad at our UserVoice channel. Since then we've improved again and are generally good at all channels. With this experience in mind, I'd suggest reaching out through multiple channels if you want to get through to them. Try email and Twitter as well as the obvious channel.

lylejohnson2• 14 years ago

I stopped using Sparrow due to a bug in their implementation of two-factor authentication for Gmail (it would always "forget" my app-specific password on startup). I got at least one (unhelpful) response to my support request(s) but the trail eventually went dead, with no resolution to the problem.

squadron2• 14 years ago

I can't for the life of me sign into my gmail account using the Sparrow iPhone app. Is this an issue other people have been having?

dorianj• 14 years ago

I've been using Sparrow with an app-specific password for months without problems.

mgcross• 14 years ago

I've also had a lot of problems, primarily that email subjects don't properly link to the body. Very confusing. I gave up on the app after a couple of updates.

plusbryan• 14 years ago

100% with you here - the latest version of Sparrow has some serious bugs that cause among other things, kernel panics. Previous versions have seen silently deleted messages, and other such nonsense. An email client should be, above all, reliable.

tonyarkles• 14 years ago

Sparrow has bugs that cause kernel panics? I've never seen this, but... I'd argue that if userspace programs can cause KPs, that's an OSX problem, not necessarily a Sparrow problem.

Do you have a link to more info about this? I'm genuinely curious how that could happen. The only time I've ever seen OSX kernel panics was either due to faulty hardware or due to doing something silly (like messing with kernel extensions)

jonshea• 14 years ago

I find Sparrow for Mac much more pleasant than gmail or Mail.app. I’ve been on Sparrow’s beta build since the Sparrow beta started. I haven’t had any serious issues since version 1.0 was released, and I’ve received grateful replies to all of the minor issues I have emailed them about.

Sparrow for iOS is an insta-buy for me.

halostatue• 14 years ago

Yes, Sparrow's customer support is substandard.

I had used emoji in some of my label names—all valid Unicode code points—and it broke Sparrow hard (to the point where even preferences would self-dismiss on clicking an icon). It took about six weeks to get to the point where the "unusual" Unicode characters were the problem.

It's a nice email client, but I don't find it that much better than the native gmail email interface that I use most of the time.

dawson• 14 years ago

I'm using (and loving) it, until notifications are available then boxcar is a temporary solution, for me at least.

railsjedi2• 14 years ago

Would love to see a writeup on how to set up boxcar for as a replacement. Maybe Sparrow should implement their push notifications by just integrating with Boxcar and making it idiot proof.

jdg• 14 years ago

http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/iphone/faq/articles/PushBoxcar...

And we'll have a blog post up at http://blog.boxcar.io here soon too. It's a bit easier than the above now, as you can just choose "Sparrow" from the list of Installed Clients to have it work.

dteoh• 14 years ago

I wonder if they have plans to turn this into a universal app or if we will have to purchase another version for the iPad (not that I'm complaining about paying for a valuable product).

mike-cardwell8• 14 years ago

Has anyone tested this client with The Email Privacy Tester yet? https://grepular.com/email_privacy_tester/ - I'd do it myself, but I don't have an iOS device.

ropiku• 14 years ago

Here's my result: http://cl.ly/1p2M3C462Y0E0u0F0w3b

mike-cardwell8• 14 years ago

Interesting that it seems to loads remote Flash content. I wonder if you could do anything nefarious with that capability. I don't know Flash enough to comment.

Tyrannosaurs4• 14 years ago

Leaks on 12 out of 32.

mike-cardwell8• 14 years ago

Does it have an option to enable/disable automatic loading of remote images? If so, what is it set to by default? And does it still leak if you disable loading of remote images?

dsplittgerber• 14 years ago

I was seriously shocked to see that the iPhone's native client leaked that bad. 2 questions: 1) Is it possible for an app to leak less? 2) Is the 'leakage' already commonly exploited by firms for specific means? (proving you saw something etc.)

If anyone could help, that'd be awesome!

mike-cardwell8• 14 years ago

My understanding (I don't have an iOS device) is that the standard iOS email client has remote images enabled by default, and if you turn that off, then it doesn't leak at all. I think all email clients should have the option to automatically load remote images, but that it should be disabled by default. The problem is, users don't understand that by clicking the "load remote images" button, it will be possible to track them, so they often don't understand its purpose.

It is possible for an email app to not leak at all. All it has to do is not load remote content unless the user specifically requests it.

Yes, these tricks are commonly exploited. Most of the time, people just use a simple img tag pointing to a 1 pixel image, although recently there was some news about Facebook using the bgsound tag.

I don't know if law enforcement ever use these sort of techniques to try and track down suspects, but it wouldn't surprise me.

martind81• 14 years ago

This app's really awesome. 2 small annoying things though, that I hope will be fixed later is: › the freeze for a few seconds when I open the app (on an iPhone 4S) › the lack of push

railsjedi2• 14 years ago

Sparrow on iPhone is amazing. Takes an app like this to really show how old and crusty the default mail app has become for power users.

I really hope this trend continues and we can see power user replacements for Safari and Calendar as well.

bbx• 14 years ago

They posted several icon drafts on Dribbble to gather feedback from the users, but it doesn't seem like they listened to the suggestions (or maybe they didn't have time to submit a new icon?).

http://dribbble.com/shots/442430-Sparrow-iPhone-icon

cburgas• 14 years ago

Just installed it on my iPhone. I like it so far but it definitely needs landscape mode while writing an email

martingordon2• 14 years ago

This is nice, and the lack of push notifications can be seen as a feature – less distractions! One possible solution to that issue is to build a push notification server into the desktop version so they wouldn't have to store your credentials.

One thing that keeps me from using Sparrow for OS X (or any other desktop client) is that they download every email, and I don't want to spare the 7 GB of hard drive space for something I don't need every day. Mail for iOS lets me choose to store only the last X messages on the device, but I haven't seen that option on any desktop client.

klausa• 14 years ago

You could emulate that behavior by setting up filters in Mail.app on OS X, that would delete messages older than X days, for what it's worth.

martingordon2• 14 years ago

Wouldn't that also delete the from my IMAP server (in my case, Gmail)? I'd also be worried about deleting the messages from my [All Mail] folder, which is what I have a real issue with (my inbox is rarely very large).

goddamnhippie• 14 years ago

Sparrow for Mac has the option to chose to download messages on demand. It's on Preferences > Advanced.

sidwyn2• 14 years ago

I hate the swipe function on each cell. They should do it like how Tweetie used to.

flyosity• 14 years ago

Due to how they implemented the "panels" interface, swiping left-to-right on a row will pull the entire panel, so they had to implement it as only right-to-left to expose the actions. Kinda annoying, but it was a design decision forced on them by another design decision they made.

sidwyn2• 14 years ago

I meant they should remove the gradual swipe, and do a full swipe once the touch moves say 30px, instead of the cell moving along with my thumb.

dr_• 14 years ago

When your email client wants to be able to post as you on your Facebook wall, that's never a good thing.

samnm• 14 years ago

As far as I know it only uses Facebook to pull display pictures for received emails, which is actually a pretty cool feature.

stock_toaster• 14 years ago

I wonder why they don't use gravatar.

They have the email handy already.

krmmalik• 14 years ago

I've tried a number of email clients on the iPhone. In the end, i nearly always end up reverting back to the default app. There's something about the simplicity of it that always brings me back. That said, the other apps were always slower fetching mail from gmail which never helps. The only app that i have found to be very good is the gmail for iPhone app, but i only use it occasionally when the default app cant find an email address from my gmail address book. I should really use the gmail app more. Its mostly good enough.

Either way, whichever app i settle with in the end, its going to be the one that is the quickest in operation.

smerickson• 14 years ago

this is outstanding. Does anyone know if you can change the color of labels? they don't match my gmail label colors.

joering2• 14 years ago

Just quick question, since I lost a track of AppStore Developer's guides&rules: wasn't there a rule that an app that is copying functionality provided in iOS will not be approved? Was that changed? Aside of this email app, I dont see any music players for my iPod other than the native Apple app (I see plenty of opportunities for an upgrade).

Terretta2• 14 years ago

There are lots of alternative music players. I use the SRS Labs' "MyTunes" for example, which is even iTunes Match savvy.

sprog• 14 years ago

If this doesn't support pop, it's not worth my time.

dbg9• 14 years ago

Doesn't support Outlook... just a warning to anyone who assumed it would support everything the default mail client on the phone supported.

artursapek• 14 years ago

Did one of the founders go to RISD? It was weird seeing my school's president on the splash page.

ksajadi• 14 years ago

Lack of push was a deal breaker for me. They argue they don't want to store the credentials on their servers, but at least with Gmail they don't need to as it supports OAuth. The only issue I can see is holding the IMAP IDLE connections open for thousands of users which can be a bi* and a half to get right. Although http://www.nuevasync.com/ guys have done it successfully.

Sparrow for iPhone

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