Reconquering Gmail on older iOS devices

Back in April, Google sent me this email:

On 30 May, you may lose access to apps that are using less secure sign-in technology

To help keep your account secure, Google will no longer support the use of third-party apps or devices which ask you to sign in to your Google Account using only your username and password. Instead, you’ll need to sign in using Sign in with Google or other more secure technologies, like OAuth 2.0. Learn more

What do you need to do?

Email software, like Outlook 2016 or earlier, has less secure access to your Gmail. Switch to Office 365, Outlook 2019 or newer, or any other email software where you can sign in using Sign in with Google.

An iOS or macOS device has less secure access to your account info like email, calendars and contacts. To keep using your Google Account on that device:

Remove your Google Account in your device’s settings

Sign in again using Sign in with Google, or select Google as the account type

If that doesn’t work, you may need to update your device’s operating system.

As someone who still own several iOS devices of various vintages, as far back as a first-generation iPod Touch running iPhone OS 3.1.3, this was concerning. You see, as technology progresses and older devices get obsoleted in the most creative ways, their usefulness is also reduced. APIs get deprecated, security protocols get updated, services get discontinued. As time passes, only old apps that let you do stuff locally seem to remain relevant.

Browsing the Web is a pain point. While I still can visit a lot of sites using various browsers on my first-generation iPad with iOS 5.1.1, things are progressively getting hit-or-miss, and more and more often, even sites that do load are now so bloated by crapscripts and stuff that checks if you have an ad-blocker activated, etc., that you either end up with a broken or partially-loaded website, or whatever outdated browser you’re using just crashes. The experience gets frustrating quickly.

Given that email is older than the Web, one of the things these older iOS devices are still good at is handling email. I’ve been relying on them a lot mainly because over the years I’ve been accumulating a lot of email accounts, and it’s nice to have that old iPhone 4 or iPod Touch 4 to quickly check some of the least-used accounts, or those accounts I keep only to receive newsletters and messages from mailing lists.

On all my iOS devices (older and newer), I tend to use Apple’s Mail app because it’s simply good at its job. It’s nothing fancy, but it works. After May 30, all Gmail accounts configured through Mail on older iOS devices have stopped working, because on those older iOS devices, when you configure a Gmail account, it is done in a way Google considers not secure (enough) — i.e. with a username/password method.

This is true for iOS 7 and earlier versions. From iOS 8 onward, when you want to add a new Google email account, you do get redirected to the Sign In with Google Web interface, but I’ve noticed that sign in fails under iOS 8, iOS 9, and iOS 10 (with different errors). I have no way to check what happens under iOS 11. On iOS 12 and newer versions, there are no problems.

Now, since I still use iOS devices running versions as old as iOS 5, I wanted to see if I could find a solution to be able to keep working with my Gmail accounts with an email client, instead of resorting to the Web interface. (Nothing wrong with using a browser, I just prefer dedicated email apps).

At the time of writing this (14 June 2022), on iOS 7 one third-party app that allows you to add Gmail accounts using Google’s more secure method is myMail. As you can see on the App Store page, the app requires iOS 13 or later, so to bring it to your older device with iOS 7, you can use the old trick of downloading it on the supported device, then opening the App Store app on your older device, going to Purchased apps, tapping on the app, and finally you’ll be prompted if you want to download the last compatible version.

The last compatible version of myMail for iOS 7 still works (again, at the time of writing), and I was able to configure a few Gmail accounts on my iPhone 4.

On iOS 8 and newer versions, a better alternative that still works with these older iOS versions is Spark. Again, it requires iOS 13.4 or later, so the trick to have it on your older iOS device is the same outlined above. I was able to successfully configure Gmail accounts on my devices running iOS 8.4.1, iOS 9.3.5 / 9.3.6, and iOS 10.3.6.

Unfortunately, at the moment, I still haven’t found a workaround for iOS 5 and iOS 6. I had an older version of Google’s iOS Gmail app on my iPod Touch 4 running iOS 6.1.6, but it doesn’t work anymore: when you open it, you get a prompt telling you to ‘Update Gmail to continue’ — which obviously you can’t.

It’s only Gmail, at least for now

Note that all this is exclusive to Gmail. If you, like me, use Apple’s iOS Mail app on older devices to handle email with other accounts, these will still work. It’s Google that now wants you to log in to your email by using a ‘more secure’ method. I’m using quotes here because at first glance Sign In with Google to me still looks like you’re signing in with username and password, only on the Web instead of via iOS’s Settings. Maybe it’s because it’s using a more secure HTTPS protocol.

I’m glad there are workarounds, of course, and that, overall, it’s not the end of the world. Surely, I’m also an edge case by still having all these vintage iOS devices around, although I know a few people who are still using iPhone models like the 4S and 5 because they prefer smaller devices, and are therefore stuck on iOS 9 and iOS 10 (which remain great iOS versions, by the way, and a lot of stuff keeps working on them to this day).

Though not a severe issue, I still find it mildly annoying:

In case you don’t receive or miss that warning email from Google I quoted at the beginning, you suddenly start getting authentication errors when trying to access your Gmail account(s) and don’t know what’s happening. And if you’re not much tech-savvy, you may even think the worst (Has my account been hacked!?)

Then, if you’ve always used only Apple’s Mail to handle all your email, you’ll have to start looking for alternatives — third-party clients that have been around long enough that an older version will still work under older iOS releases and it lets you configure a Gmail account using Google’s sanctioned secure method.

It is annoying that tech companies are less and less interested in providing workable fallbacks for older devices or system software versions. To be fair, Google has allowed what they call Less Secure Access for years, though the irritating detail of such implementation was that after a relatively short time, Google would auto-disable it in your account, and you had to manually go back and activate it again (you usually noticed when Google disabled Less Secure Access because logging in to your Gmail account would fail).

Anyway, I hope this article may be of assistance to those who have experienced the same issues. And if you know of older iOS email clients that still work under iOS 5 or 6, and let you configure Gmail accounts properly, get in touch and I will update the information provided here.