Mountain View, California — As if BlackBerry owners do not have enough on their plates as it continues to suffer the slow torture of death by a thousand cuts: Google, which last week botched the launch of a Gmail application for Apple iOS devices, has decided to put out to pasture its Gmail application for the BlackBerry on November 22, so snap it up now if you want it.
The tragedy strikes by the end of November Google will no longer offer technical support to users of its native Gmail app for BlackBerry, nor will it allow people to download it anymore, thus forcing users instead to log in to the revamped, HTML5-friendly Gmail through BlackBerry’s mobile browser.
“Beginning November 22, 2011, we will end support for the Gmail App for Blackberry (installed native app). Over this past year, we have focused efforts on building a great Gmail experience in the mobile browser and will continue investing in this area,” Google wrote in a blog post.
Surprisingly, that date, incidentally befalls exactly forty-eight years after the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy – though, its puzzling if Google is making a statement about the future fate of besieged, struggling RIM.
However, users will be able to continue using it, although Google will divert its major development efforts on the version of the application for mobile browsers, available at gmail.com.
Google relaunched Gmail at the beginning of the month to incorporate more HTML5 features, like resizing to fit the screen and customizing the placement of widgets. But owners of smartphones from the tormented, RIM may find that a bit of cold comfort, even though Google Apps for Business, Government, and Education customers that use Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server will continue to be supported.
Additionally, Google offers a native Gmail client for its own Android mobile operating system, and baffled industry watchers by rolling out a native Gmail client for Apple’s iOS–even though bugs made the company quickly withdraw the app. It seems clear that Google is not averse to developing native clients for mobile OS’s other than its own, but it is curious that it would decide to embrace iOS and abandon RIM’s BlackBerry platform in the space of a few days.
Nevertheless, for a while now Research in Motion has been trying to inspire app developers to its platforms by promoting HTML5 app development, or Web browser-based apps that are not native to any platform.
The move comes just days after Google released a Gmail application for iPhones, iPods and iPads running version 4.0 or higher of iOS, but soon after had to abruptly snap it off from the Apple App Store because it had a notification bug that caused it to malfunction.