A few days ago, Google Latitude for iPhone made headlines with this little snippet from their announcement.
We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.
Lots of complaining in the comments how the user experience and utility of Google Latitude suffers because it’s just a web app. Of course the real problem is that background processes are prohibited on the iPhone and therefore even a dedicated app couldn’t improve on the functionality of the web app. If you wanted to continually update your location you’d still be forced to leave Latitude running as the foreground app, just like in your browser. Push notifications won’t do much good for pushing data off your phone, either. In the long run i suspect that Latitude will find its way into the offficial iPhone Maps application anyway.
On the upside, though, i feel much more compelled to try the service on my iPhone instead of my Android phone because it feels like i’m actually staying in control of what get’s shared and when. Truth be told, automatic background location sharing freaks me out a little bit.
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