For a while now, many of you have been asking for a better way to access data to build apps that integrate with Gmail. While IMAP is great at what it was designed for (connecting email clients to email servers in a standard way), it wasn’t really designed to do all of the cool things that you have been working on, which is why this week at Google I/O, we’re launching the beta of the new Gmail API.
Apple bloggers will no doubt lose their minds over this announcement, expect to read “open” in quotation marks many times today. Sure, this could eventually mean desktop or mobile clients being forced to serve ads, but it could also mean a return of features that were removed when Google stopped supporting Microsoft’s ActiveSync. Let’s wait and see.