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thinkadam

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 12, 2011
190
26
Canada
Anyone install the new gmail official app?
My battery was ok with 5.0.1 but since adding gmail its been draining faster.
Just removed it and will see if it makes a difference.
Can anyone comment on this?
thanks
 

crovian

macrumors regular
Nov 17, 2010
142
0
it's weird that you mention it because I recently noticed a battery drop and the unusual part is that i haven't had a battery problem on iOS5 or iOS5.0.1 which I had since the day it came out.

but couple days ago, i noticed my battery drops unusually fast and i did have the gmail app.

i deleted it now and will see if it improves.
 

jpcarro

macrumors 6502
Mar 13, 2009
428
82
On your nine
I'm running gmail app...with tri-tone notification alert turned off. And I turned off gmail exchange under Apple mail. Been watching battery closely and all is good.
 

thinkadam

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 12, 2011
190
26
Canada
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I closed but didn't delete. So far it's better. Something going on there.
Prob not worth keeping
 

abbstrack

macrumors 6502
Nov 21, 2008
279
90
SoCal
thanks for the heads up. it's backgrounding on my phone, and i went to bed last night at 40% (around 11pm) and woke up at 4am to 3% battery power. will completely close it and watch. i've noticed severe battery issues this week however after 5.01, which i think are unrelated to the gmail app, so i don't know where to turn.
 

BTDT

macrumors newbie
Nov 20, 2011
1
0
See problem on iPhone 4 but not iPad 1

I definitely experienced severe battery drain with the Gmail app on my iPhone 4. I went to bed with around 90% battery and woke up with around 50%. The only change to my phone to account for this was loading the Gmail app.

The odd thing is that I have the same app on my iPad 1, and am not seeing a large amount of drain there. I am wondering if the larger amount of RAM on the iPhone 4 is allowing the app to stay resident longer, while on the iPad it almost always does a full restart whenever I launch it.

At this point I have deleted the app from my iPhone but kept it on the iPad. I like having access to full conversation views and my labels, but it isn't worth the extreme battery drain. The app is definitely doing something inappropriate while it sits in the background -- which would show up if I took the time to delve into it better with the various resource and performance apps that are out there.

The odd thing is that this problem is not widely reported. I also get absolutely no response from any of the Google folks on my Google+ posts on this subject. Hmm.
 

TLewis

macrumors 65816
Sep 19, 2007
1,311
129
Google Sync is an alternative

OK, the gmail app is largely a wrapper around the gmail web interface, and so, if battery life is an issue, I'd suggest using the web interface along with google sync for push. For instructions on how to set up google sync, see here (this is for the iPhone, but the iPad and iPod touch instructions are basically the same):However, the above instructions are missing the google calendar setup, and so go here after following the above instructions: https://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=139206

Edit: note: one unfortunate quirk of google sync is that "delete" does NOT mean "delete" in iOS mail. "Delete" means "archive" if you use iOS mail. If you want true delete, you have to delete from the gmail web interface.
 

doboy

macrumors 68040
Jul 6, 2007
3,774
2,945
Here is a conspiracy theory:

Maybe Google released the app to drain battery so people will complain more about the battery life. :D
 

kas23

macrumors 603
Oct 28, 2007
5,629
288
Here is a conspiracy theory:

Maybe Google released the app to drain battery so people will complain more about the battery life. :D

Sad thing is they don't have to.

And to anyone experiencing unusual battery drain overnight, go to bed with any untested app in the multitask bar is asking for trouble. A strange sign of the times indeed.
 

S.B.G

Moderator
Staff member
Sep 8, 2010
26,637
10,403
Detroit
You sound surprised. It's definitely better to use the Mail app.

Same here. Once or if Google fixes the notifications of the app and allows us to change the alert tone and set our own alert style, the app will sit idle on my iPhone. Because of that, I still prefer the native Mail.app.

As far as the battery issue goes, mine is functioning just fine. Despite what I just wrote above, on occassion I will open the app and view my mail there; but not too often though.
 

Bluethree

macrumors regular
Jan 1, 2010
102
1
Have to agree and since 5.0.1 I have had real battery issues on my 4S and am looking around to mitigate this. Installed the Gmail app around the same time and my battery is being slaughtered for some reason or another. Process of elimination I suppose. I will kill off the Gmail app to see how it goes and although the app is very limited I like the 'push' although two mail apps and notifications is a pain in the a**e !
 

hitekalex

macrumors 68000
Feb 4, 2008
1,624
0
Chicago, USA
There has been absolutely no difference in battery life with or without Gmal app on my iPhone or iPad.

You guys are just looking for a bogey man. It's impossible for a 3rd party app like Gmail to "drain battery" while it's idled in the background. The only thing that's active about Gmail while in the background in Push process. Gmail depends on the same Push process as any other 3rd party app.
 
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