Once upon a time, Google had an iPhone optimized version iGoogle. Then Christina Warren from Download Squad caught them in the act of taking it away. Now, our sibling-site Android Central tells us it’s returned. Confusing saga, good update:
Today, we’re excited to roll out an improved beta version of iGoogle for the iPhone and Android-powered devices. This new version is faster and easier to use. It supports tabs as well as more of your favorite gadgets, including those built by third-party developers. Note that not all gadgets — like those with Flash — will work in mobile browsers.
Are you an iGoogle user? If not, is this enough to interest you? Either way, if you check it out, let us know what you think!
Christina Warren from TUAW wrote on Twitter that Google recently dumped the iPhone optimized version of iGoogle and now simply redirects users to a generic mobile version instead.
What in Google’s green earth could they be thinking? One of our readers, Jesse, wrote in to share this forum post from Google employee, Paul:
“Hey everyone, I have an update for you. We’ve decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We’ve found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones — we want to ensure you’ll all see the same version.
Most or all of your existing content should translate over to the standard mobile version. The only exception would be any gadgets that aren’t compatible with most mobile browsers.
We’ve got several articles in our Help Center about the mobile experience on iGoogle, which you can find in our Help Center [link].”
Lowest common denominator much?
Jesse also let us know that Jailbreak users have a workaround: spoofing their browser via the Cydia app, Useragent Faker.
So is this Google playing it fair, playing favorites for Android (which still has functioning Gmail in its iGoogle mobile according to Christina, unlike the iPhone or BlackBerry), or just doing the mobile equivalent of re-coding all sites to standardize on the original version of Netscape?
