“Sparrow is an iPhone mail client designed with love to provide you with an efficient and pleasant mailing experience. With its pane navigation, its new threading system and many new features, you'll never look back.”

It doesn’t take long for Mac users to realize the native Mail app included on every Mac has the ability to suck be extremely frustrating.

Sparrow, a new and improved mail app, launched in the Mac App store barely over one year ago and almost instantly took off. Since its launch it’s continued to grow and evolve over the past 13 months and is now the second most popular Mac mail client just behind Mac’s native Mail client.

Finally, after months of anticipation and speculation, Sparrow released an iPhone version of their mail app.

The price is $2.99 but if you consider yourself a power user you definitely won’t regret it. Even casual users will be able to justify the cost if for no other reason than be able to use a kickass mail app that replaces the default Mail.

Cons

As far as cons there’s really only one that I could come up with. That being said it’s a pretty major con. As of now the Sparrow app does not use push notifications. For a lot of people this may be a deal breaker. For power users, like myself, I’m in and out of my mail app so often that it doesn’t really make a difference to me.

There are also some fairly decent workarounds to still being notified when you get mail, you just won’t see the app badge icon of course. I moved my native mail client all the way to the back and inside a folder of crap apps (mostly native) that I don’t use. Then I went in set up special tone and vibration to be alerted when I get an email. So while I won’t be able to see the number of unread messages, I’ll still be able to feel or hear when I receive a new message.

Another way you could try and circumvent the issue is by taking advantage of some of the accessibility settings and actually stat using your flash as an LED alert for when you receive new messages.

As annoying as it is there are some pretty good reasons behind why they’re not able to offer push at the momentand the team at Sparrow doesn’t shy away from the issue.

There are 2 ways to deliver notifications on an iOS application:

On our side: if Sparrow was to do Push today, we would have to store your credentials (login/password) on our servers to frequently poll your accounts, and send you notifications.

This is a responsibility we’re not ready to take. As a startup focused on iOS/OS X development, we do not have the skills to secure your data on our servers and we do not want to put sensitive information at risk. That’s why Sparrow iPhone 1.0 doesn’t do push. (emphasis mine)

If you would like to have a full-fledged, feature packed client as an option to the stock mail app iOS uses then make sure you keep sending Apple feedback and asking them to support these features.

How can you help?

Apple’s App Store policy is constantly evolving. The existence of Sparrow iPhone proves it. A year ago, the app could have been rejected for ‘duplicating a native functionality’.

Simply saying that you would like Apple to reconsider its position regarding apps that could be granted the access to this API would help a lot.

If many of you express their interest in such a feature, we are confident that the Apple validation team could revise its position.

Has anyone else already started using Sparrow as their default app on the iPhone? If so let us know what you think of it so far.

[Link to Sparrow on App Store]