Google Latitude For The iPhone Is Here! iPhone Still Doesn’t Do Background Processes…

Late last week, Google announced that its Latitude location-aware service is now available on the iPhone. Latitude is a location-aware mobile app, similar to services offered by Loopt and brightkite.

Latitude has been available for Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry (most models with color screens), and Symbian S60 devices for five months, making the iPhone/iPod Touch the latest mobile device compatible with the service. Unlike on all the other major mobile platforms that have a standalone Latitude app, iPhone users must run the service inside the Safari browser. As such, it has received criticism of being crippled and worthless.

Here’s what transpired: Google already had a standalone Latitude app made for the iPhone, but Apple requested that the service be run from the web browser instead. Apparently, Apple thinks that if Latitude were released as a native app, users would be confused as to the difference between it and the Maps app, since both rely on a map for their functionality. But that’s not where the bad news ends, with Google Mobile Product Manager Mat Balez saying, “Unfortunately, since there is no mechanism for applications to run in the background on iPhone (which applies to browser-based Web apps as well), we’re not able to provide continuous background location updates in the same way that we can for Latitude users on Android, Blackberry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile. Nevertheless, your location is updated every time you fire up the app and then continuously updated while the app is running in the foreground. And, of course, you can check in on where your friends are, so we think there’s plenty of fun to be had with Latitude.”

So what we have here is an awesome concept crippled by (supposedly) the best smartphone on the market. The current implementation of Latitude on the iPhone dumbs down the functionality to a point that renders the service pointless: the real value of location-aware products such as Latitude, Loopt, and brightkite is the ability to share one’s location in real-time with friends, etc. This allows for spontaneous meet-ups and surprise visits, and all the other great uses the services are known for. Having to run Safari in order to share one’s location is not an ideal method of interaction with these services. Similarly, standalone iPhone apps from competing services such as Loopt and brightkite don’t have the ability to run in the background either. In effect, location-sharing apps that don’t constantly update the user’s location in the background defeat the purpose of such services. All this adds to my hunch that Apple will – soon enough – allow background processes on the iPhone/iPod Touch. But exactly when is “soon enough?”

The availability of Latitude on the iPhone comes after the announcement that Google’s Location Service (the same service that powers the My Location feature in many Google products) is now the default location provider in Mozilla Firefox 3.5. This means that Latitude is also available in Firefox 3.5 without any special plug-ins. This is significant, since it greatly lowers the barriers to entry for location-aware services on the desktop. To use the service on the desktop, users must add Latitude to their iGoogle home page. I have tested the service with Firefox 3.5 on the desktop and am pleased to announce that the service works like a charm: it detected my location on the Google Map and displayed my Google contacts who have enabled the feature on their end.

Posted in Apple, Decisions, Featured, Industry News, Policy, iPhone