In my post Free alternatives to MobileMe earlier this year, I looked at some free alternatives to Apple’s MobileMe service. One crucial piece was still missing though: The seamless over-the-air syncing and push email experience offered by MobileMe on the iPhone.

Google Sync – the Missing Piece of the Puzzle?

MobileMe’s biggest advantage to date has been its support for push email and over-the-air syncing, which ensures that emails and changes to calendars and contacts are synced to iPhone users instantly.

But with Google Sync, Google aims to offer GMail and Google Calendar  users the same over-the-air syncing feature that MobileMe does. To accomplish this, Google is basically taking advantage of the fact that the iPhone (and most other smartphones) natively support Microsoft Exchange syncing. So Google are offering their own Exchange-compatible service, that acts as an intermediary between your data stored in Google’s services and your iPhone. Configure Google Sync as a new exchange account on your iPhone, enable Push support and Google will Push any new email messages, calendar or contact updates to your phone.

When you consider that iCal, Address Book and Mail on the Mac also natively support syncing with Google’s services, Google Sync starts to look like a very interesting alternative to MobileMe. Change a contact in Address Book or add an appointment to iCal  and those changes should be synced right up to your phone, without requiring a slow, USB iTunes sync – just like MobileMe. Emails should also be delivered right away, circumventing the 15 minute fetching interval limit. Or as Google sums it up it a cutesy comic:

But how well does it work in the real world?

Setting up Google Sync on your phone isn’t particularly difficult and Google offers easy step-by-step instructions. Enter your details, ignore a certificate warning, enter some more details and you’re done.

Emails

But mysteriously my Gmail inbox would only show 3 messages I had received this morning, with no sign of any messages I had received earlier in the week or later today. The same problem affected my other mailboxes as well. I was able to coax a few more messages off the server by selecting to only sync a week’s worth of email messages, but that does severely limit habitual emails hoarders such as myself. A know current limitation of the service is also the fact that drafts can’t be edited, once synced.

Contacts

My Google contacts showed up fairly quickly in my Contacts application. But new contacts didn’t seem to sync back up to Gmail, no matter how often I tried to coax Google Sync into action.

Conclusion

Judging by the discussions going on over on the Google Sync messageboards, it looks as though the service has been pretty flaky for users the last few days, so these are most likely serious teething issues. But until these reliability problems are sorted out, it’s hard to realistically see Google Sync as a serious MobileMe alternative anytime soon.

Having said that, it’s promising to see Google taking the initiative and trying to offer an Exchange-like experience for non-corporate / non-MobileMe user – so Google gets a gold star for trying. It’s also worth remembering that MobileMe (a $99 per year service) had its own fair share of teething issues, so let’s hope Google is able to really challenge Apple in this area in the near future.

But for the time being, I’ll be sticking with regular Gmail IMAP syncing for my emails and MobileMe syncing for my contacts and calendars.

I decided to time exactly how long it takes for a Gmail message to be pushed to the iPhone over Wifi and over GPRS / EDGE:

Basically Apple will rely on a data connection to their “Push Notification” servers to send messages to 3rd party applications with information that would normally be displayed by an app running in the background. For example: If you were to receive a new chat message whilst your IM client isn’t running, the IM service servers would notify Apple’s Push Notification servers, which would in turn send a message to the iPhone to add a “1″ icon to your IM apps home screen icon.

All about the Customer

This solution is elegant in two ways:

1. It solves the issue of background apps draining battery life and slowing down the phone without requiring any input by the user. There’s no “Task Manager”, no remembering to close apps, nothing technical at all.
2. It cleverly takes advantage of the reason you’d want background notifications in the first place: to receive updates from something that has happened online. So you’ll need a data connection for this to work, but in places without a data connection you wouldn’t need a background notification in the first place.

So instead of having applications running on your phone that poll your IM servers for new messages, Apple is effectively offloading the processing power required to do that to “the cloud”. A server somewhere will check for new messages and once a new message has been received, you’ll be notified. For a company such as AOL, setting up that kind of server-based service should be fairly trivial.

You and whose server?

But lets consider another scenario: Imagine you’re an independent developer who has a great RSS reader that you’d like to port to the iPhone. On every other device, you’d write the app, tell it to check the users various feeds every x minutes and sell it for $10. Mission accomplished.

Apple’s model instead now requires you to set up a server that knows which feeds a particular user is subscribed to, checks those feeds every x minutes and then notifies Apple’s notification servers once a new article is published. With 10 million potential users subscribed to dozens of different feeds, the server and bandwidth costs associated with that kind of service suddenly become pretty significant. Plus those are costs that are recurring – so you either have to charge the user a much higher price for the app, or even turn your idea into a subscription service, instead of a one-time license purchase (assuming the AppStore even supports subscriptions).

Consequences

I believe the Push Notification Service will mean that those sorts of Apps will be left to “larger players” such as Google, Yahoo and perhaps larger software developers such as Newsgator, who already offer similar web-based services. Indie devs will not want to deal with the extra hassle of running a server application and worrying about all the associated costs of keeping the service running.

Instead indie devs will either choose to simply make their apps “active-only”, meaning you’ll only receive updates when you decide to launch the app and check for them, or they’ll focus on apps that don’t require notifications at all.

On a side note: the technical limitations of this service also means apps such as mobileScrobbler that can send details about your recently listened tracks to the Last.FM service as you play them or stream music in the background whilst you check your email will probably not be feasible in their current form at all.

Overall

The advantages of this approach outweigh the drawbacks, but it’s clear that this solution does have at least a few drawbacks.