This article is more than 1 year old

Yahoo! releases! Android! apps!

Renovates iOS clients

Yahoo has released a couple of native Android applications tied to its services and sprinkled some HTML 5 dust over its iOS offerings.

Those who want Google's platform, but also access to Yahoo's servers, can now have both with a dedicated application thanks to Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger going native on Android. Meanwhile iOS users get new versions of the web-based clients, with HTML 5 used to enable offline editing and desktop integration.

Yahoo is making much of the fact that it's never done this before, but we're sure that Yahoo! Go had much of the same functionality until it was killed off last year. Given that the last iteration of Go was developed in Java it shouldn't have been too much of a stretch to port the important bits to to Android, so Yahoo! didn't exactly start from scratch.

But this isn't a do-everything portal like Go was. This is three separate applications that Android users can install as they wish – one for mail, one for IM and a third to provide that homepage search widget for when Google doesn't have the answer you need.

Samsung, which has been cosying up to Yahoo! lately, has signed on to put advertising into the mail application, which includes the now-essential push-notification capability.

Mail and messaging are available from the Android Marketplace now, but the search widget is only available in the USA for reasons unknown. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like