Sparrow For iPhone Gets Push Email With Jailbreak Tweak

Sparrow for iPhone was finally unleashed on the world a couple of days ago, but fans of the email client were disappointed to learn that a key piece of functionality had been left out: push support. That one feature was all that stopped Sparrow from being the perfect email client for the iPhone, and there's no word on exactly when push is due to be supported. Good news: if you've jailbroken your device, then a simply tweak from Cydia enables push functionality in the app.Sparrow Push does exactly what it says on the tin: enables push email support for Sparrow. It hasn't quite reached Cydia yet, as the BigBoss repo has yet be refreshed, but it will be a free download when it's available in the next few hours.

We got in touch with the developer behind the change asking if this was enabling existing code or if it was new: he confirmed that the code to enable push is already baked into Sparrow, and that the function is purely being held back by Apple. The Sparrow team previously put forward a version of the app that utilized Apple's background connectivity API, although it was rejected from the Store. They hope that Apple will allow a push enabled version in the future.

Other functions of Sparrow includes Gmail label support, avatar pictures for contacts, as well as a swipe and gesture based UI. You can swipe up and down through threaded email conversations, and swiping to the left on emails brings up options such as replying, starring, tagging, and archiving. It's available on the App Store for $2.99, and the jailbreak push tweak if you want to grab it is free.

[via 9to5Mac]