This an absurdly easy thing to check for. This has happened first with the Google Voice app, then with the Google+ app, now with the GMail app. Is Google committed to systematically destroying their own brand?
Isn't Apple destroying their brand with the original iPhone 4's crappy antenna and with the new iPhone 4's crappy battery life?
The OP isn't complaining about this bug. He's complaining of what appears to be a systemic problem both technically and in product design with Googles iOS apps. These issues can't just be hand waved away as easily as "It's software"
Bugs happen, always. And, of course, there are compromises you have to make to product, always, in order to ship.
What matters is where you draw the line. I'm sure that nobody will say that the antenna problem 'ruined' the iPhone. After all, it still launched, people still bought it, and all was well.
Three times now, for some reason, Google has * completely* ruined their launches. The Google Voice app, the Google+ app, and the GMail app all had easily caught, gamebreaking bugs that were so major that they required a full recall of the app.
For a tiny startup, this sort of launch-fumbling would be pretty bad. For an enormous company, it's almost laughable.
The new iPhone's battery life is nearly the same as the old one. What may cause issues (for some people) is the new version of iOS - whatever it is, the problem has something to do with the software configuration. It's not hitting all the users and it seems to be hitting some people with older phones (iPhone 3gs, iPhone 4) when they update.
Not to mention that these battery complaints surface every iPhone release. The reality is that safe and reliable Li-Ion charging is black magic. I'm pretty sure that brand-new lithium batteries don't reach their full charge capacity until they've gone through a few cycles, and/or the charge controller has 'learned' the attributes of that individual battery.
Every new iPhone I've bought -- and I've owned them all except the 3G -- has run down quickly the first couple of times I charged it, and every one has eventually achieved reasonable battery life after the break-in period. The 4S was no exception. Non-story, move on. It's unclear why Apple doesn't explain this.
Sure, part of that is just that you tend to use it a lot when something's new and shiny. But no, based on personal experience I'm pretty sure the issue is in software - some subset of the new features enabled by iOS5 is taking more juice than was expected.
I did discover one such issue. I have the New York Times app and access to a subscription for it. After updating to iOS5, the first time I tried to use the NYT app, it moved itself into the new "Newsstand" and changed its behavior so I started getting "alerts" whenever anything allegedly newsworthy happened. I had never gotten such alerts before, because I had that feature turned off. It was ridiculously hard to find the option to entirely turn off unattended polling related to the NYT app because the setting isn't where you'd expect it to be. (It's in Settings:Store)
(Apple has apparently identified some of the issues and just started beta-testing an update that is alleged to fix them.)
I agree that Maps on Android is superior to Maps on iOS, just as native Gmail on Android is better than Gmail on iOS, but the parent was using iOS Maps as an example of a good Google iOS app – it isn't a good example because Google didn't write Maps for iOS.
It's not about whether Apple writes better iOS apps than Google does for Android, it's about whether Google makes any good apps for iOS.
Everyone seems to have missed my point, which was that Google has never created a good iOS app. Google Maps is the closest thing to a good iOS app that involves Google. So we have no reason to give them any slack on this; the way we forgave Apple for the iPhone 4 antenna.
Isn't Apple destroying their brand with the original iPhone 4's crappy antenna and with the new iPhone 4's crappy battery life?
Bugs happen. It's software.