As someone who has dealt with integrating and synchronizing data and accounts nearly my entire career, I can tell you this whole area is still in "there be dragons here" territory.
Here's a recent example of stuff Google did - merged my G+ circles into my contacts - ok, I can see how that'd be useful... but old or invalid email address for my mom and wife were substituted as first hits on the search when I entered the contacts in Gmail. Consequently, I've sent quite a few emails in the past few days where I'm getting bounces.
That's assuming you don't have to deal with improperly overwritten data, or time-sensitive data (ie, temporary details). Any degree of asynchronicity can create intolerable delays for example.
Abstractions can only get so far, especially for distributed synchronization across potentially adversarial vendors/systems.
If this stuff were easy, it would have been solved. That said, if Apple let us have the APIs, we could take a stab at solving it ourselves.
Re:Re-Designing the classic email client
by smacktoward on Tuesday July 10, 2012 @12:13PM
(#4224521)
Yeah, even webOS made a creditable stab in this direction. And that was what, three years ago?
Maemo on the N900 is pretty great too.
Re:Re-Designing the classic email client
by dave1010uk on Wednesday July 11, 2012 @01:59AM
(#4227972)
To expand on this, Maemo had a "Conversations" application that you could add accounts to. Out of the box I believe it did SMS, Skype and Google Talk. There were plugins available for third party services like Twitter, Facebook, MSN, Jabber, etc.
Take Windows Phone for example: tap a contact in WP and you see their tweets, Facebook messages, your SMS and e-mail history with them. The messages app integrates SMS and Live chat seamlessly. Ideally this system would open up to allow any third party to plug into these hubs (and from the early signs of WP8, it will), but it's still already lightyears ahead of Apple's offering. Even Android, with it's system of intents and actions, provides more integration than iOS. I'm baffled as to why they've not tried to do anything about this.