On mobile apps, Palm and Google show history repeats itself

It’s not just Apple and AT&T who have problems delivering the needs of mobile users, both Google and Palm have also let the ball slip in recent days.

Strike one: Google, which yesterday introduced real time “push” Gmail sync for the iPhone. Seems too many iPhone users wanted this feature, with Dan Frommer helpfully pointing out a deluge of frustrated user comments on Google’s blog pages and Twitter.

Set-up, Frommer reports, runs smoothly, “but emails simply aren’t being pushed to our phone in real-time — we need to wait several minutes and/or manually check the mailbox before they show up, which defeats the purpose of push,” he writes. Google, presumably, is working to ramp up its infrastructure to support this new service.

Meanwhile, over at Palm (in the news a lot today as it issues millions of dollars in new shares in an attempt to put together some investment capital), there’s a similar problem – the company’s application approval team can’t keep up with the apps they’re being asked to review (remind you of anything?)

Responding to developers complaining at lengthy delays and opacity in getting their apps approved, Palm Developer Community Manager Chuq Von Rospach posted the following on Palm’s developer discussion boards:

“We got more applications than we could handle well, which is a good problem to have. Unfortunately, it means we dropped some things on the floor, and that’s bad, but with the impending "stuff" that’s coming, this is all going to get a lot easier for everyone and a lot more transparent.

“If you didn’t get a response in a timely manner, let me apologize to you. We should have done a better job on this, and I apologize for this. I’m working with the people I work with on this to try to make sure we do a better job of this moving forward. Good news is we’ve hired some people — one’s started, one starts next week, and the third starts the week after that, and that’ll give us some great people and some new resources to make sure this gets fixed and works properly.”

We wonder if Palm and Google will be pilloried quite as much as Apple and AT&T have been for similar infrastructure and approval shortcomings?