GMail for iPhone FAIL - how it happened:

I was excited to see Gmail for iPhone finally released. Truth is, I was even more excited to see the error popup soon as I opened the app.

The reason for this is that I struggled with the same problem for one of my own apps: The New Republic for iPad. Firstly I was glad to see I wasn’t the only one who experienced this problem that simply shouldn’t have happened - “I swear, it’s not our fault!”. Secondly, it made me feel better that if Google can screw up so majorly, my minor fuck-ups are just that: minor.

For anyone interested, the reason this happened is due to a previously existing bug in iTunes Connect Provisioning - whereby the link to the Push notification environment setting (‘production’) was not being included in the download link. IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN… and it is now. Even though I had everything setup right in my app, this omission meant that push notification verification fails on the app. It can’t be seen till it has been downloaded via iTunes so no way to fully test until it goes live.

The differences for me were that I kept the issue silent (no confusing user alert message) and that my app did not rely so heavily on PUSH… yet. Okay, okay - and because we’re not Google :-).

Anyway, like Google (assumedly), I did more research and found the problem - ie. simply re-creating the provisioning profile solves it (Apple have since fixed the bug)… Fingers crossed that for their next release (and mine - submitting later today) we’ll be back on track.