Tons of people have asked me over the past few months when Google’s Latitude friend-finding application would be available for the iPhone. Originally launched for Google’s own Android operating system, Latitude for the iPhone is on its way sometime this summer pending the release of the iPhone 3.0 update.
The reason Google is waiting for the software update is because Latitude won’t be launched as a separate application. Instead, it’ll run inside the Safari web browser, enabled by HTML 5 which supports geolocation. While this indicates that Google firmly believes the web is the new operating system, it doesn’t solve the problem of lacking background processing. Push notification is a step forward, but until Apple supports full background processing on the iPhone, you’ll likely have to keep the browser open to use Latitude.
