Gmail and Google Calendar on iOS Get Some Long-Awaited Improvements

As a workforce, we are becoming increasingly reliant on our mobile devices in order to do our jobs, and so it can be particularly frustrating when you can’t quickly find an email or set up an appointment on your phone. Although Google does offer mobile Web versions of its apps, there are still a lot of reasons why people might opt to utilize the native email and calendar apps on the iPhones. But in doing so they’ve had to battle some of the frustrations that come with data not syncing properly.

But Google has unveiled three updates to Google Sync today that will greatly improve Gmail and Google Calendars on your iOS devices.

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Google Sync allows you to utilize the native mail and calendar apps on the iPhone and connect them to your Gmail accounts through Microsoft Exchange. Today’s update lets you search all of your emails in Gmail, not simply the emails that are stored locally by the iOS native app. Furthermore, you’ll be able to accept or decline appointment invitations from within the native calendar app.

Finally – and a feature that’s particularly compelling for people that utilize Google Apps – you’ll be able to send email from within the native app from any email address. You’ll be able to now take advantage of Gmail’s “send mail as” feature. This means that you’ll be able to send messages via the default email you have established via your Gmail account.

To be able to utilize these updates, you will have to set up Google Sync on your iPhone. This is slightly different than simply specifying your Gmail address as your iOS account. Google has full instructions here.

To establish the “Send as” feature, you”ll need to visit http://m.google.com/sync. This will also let you sync additional Google calendars to your iOS devices.

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