For all you poor sods wonderfully fulfilled people who have made iOS your platform of choice, but miss that bit of extra functionality in your Gmail inbox, it seems that Apple may be on the cusp of approving a native Google Gmail app for iOS.
The rumour is just that at this point, with Apple and Google both keeping quiet officially, but the originator of the story is MG Siegler, of TechCrunch fame, who has a fairly good record at breaking open genuine news in this space.
In any case, let's be honest - if you have a Gmail account and an iPhone, the two get on, but it's not the greatest pairing ever seen. Perhaps the critical weakness of Gmail integration with the iOS mail app is that you lose push notifications from Google's servers (unless, of course, you're prepared to tinker to arrive at a slightly inelegant solution).
The search and labeling system in the current mail app is also a little threadbare, plus you lose all the nice colour-coding of your mail that you can get in the Android Gmail offering.
Presumably any native iOS Gmail offering will cater to these primary weakness in the current-setup.
According to MG, we can also expect to see Priority Inboxing and one touch message starring, also nice extras.
Of course, we have no idea when this app, if it really does exist, is supposed to land. 'Soon' is a disputed word in the Apple lexicon. But when it does, that'll be one less key advantage Android holds over iOS, given the last update add a couple of other long-needed features. Namely centralised notifications and wireless sync.
Custom wallpapers, thankfully, is an issue of the past. Well, of last year at least.
