On Wednesday, Google announced that they updated Google Sync for iOS devices. Google Sync is a background service that lets iOS users sync with Google’s Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts using Microsoft ActiveSync. The updates, among other things, bring better search functionality to Gmail accounts set up in iOS.
Google Sync essentially acts as a bridge to keep your iOS devices native mail, contacts, and calendar apps in perfect sync with your Google account. The new updates bring several improvements, which Google detailed in their announcement. From the Google Enterprise Blog:
Today, three new updates to Google Sync for iOS will allow you to:
- Search all your emails in Gmail, not just the emails stored locally by the iOS mail app.
- Accept, decline or edit calendar events from the iOS calendar app.
- Send email from the address you want. We recognize that some of you manage multiple email addresses from a single Gmail account.Gmail’s “Send Mail as” feature lets you send messages with another email address listed as the sender instead of your Gmail address, e.g. joe@altostrat.com instead of joe@gmail.com. Now the iOS mail app will respect these settings.
The changes apply to all Google accounts set up for these services. I’m pretty happy that they’ve made these changes – they’re all overdue and very welcome additions to the Sync service, and I’ll make use of all the changes on a regular basis. Thanks, Google, for continuing to improve your free products and services!
If you havent already done so, and would like to set up Google Sync on your iOS device, you can find instructions on Google’s website: Setting up Google Sync with your iOS device