A year ago, Google released an optimized version of iGoogle for the iPhone. But recently, Google began redirecting iPhone users away from that optimized version, and to the standard mobile version of iGoogle.
The optimized version was located at http://google.com/ig/i and here is a screen capture from Google Operating System.
Now, users are redirected to http://google.com/m/ig/, which is the standard mobile version, it looks like this:
This seemed to start happening on Thursday, and since then, iPhone users have jumped into the Google Web Search forum revolting over the change. Paul from Google tried to calm users down by saying:
Hey everyone, I have an update for you. We've decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We've found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones -- we want to ensure you'll all see the same version.Most or all of your existing content should translate over to the standard mobile version. The only exception would be any gadgets that aren't compatible with most mobile browsers.
We've got several articles in our Help Center about the mobile experience on iGoogle, which you can find in our Help Center.
But that just caused more discussion and anger towards Google. Just browsing through the really long thread, it seems like Google is getting a lot of backlash about this change. I have a feeling, they might consider putting things back to the optimized iPhone version, which means they have to maintain an iPhone version, along with the mobile version, web version and any other version they might have.
Who is to blame? I am not sure, Google made a big stink about optimized iPhone versions of their sites. Here is a video they released in June 2008 on this iGoogle for iPhone:
So, who is to blame for iPhone users not wanting to lose this page?
Forum discussion at Google Web Search.
