Google is discontinuing Inbox | Hacker News Reader

Google is discontinuing Inbox

fastcompany.com

916 pointsedwinvlieg439 comments

Inbox changed my relationship with email and it is unbelievably frustrating to hear it is being shuttered. I was a better digital person because of the app: I never forgot to reply, I kept years of ideas and small notes in reminders, and I could quickly triage and clear all incoming mail.

These things in particular made Inbox stand out:

* UI - simple, uncluttered mobile and desktop experience with uncomplicated keyboard shortcuts. It even had the little things like a satisfying sun animation when your inbox was empty! Desktop Gmail has a surfeit of widgets and add-on icons that perplex, distract, and confuse.

* Bundles - especially for trips: all the relevant emails I needed, in one place—unbelievably useful while traveling. All tickets and information aggregated automatically (and if not, easily added manually).

* Reminders / Compose access - fast interface for creating small notes and mailing frequently contacted people. No reminders equivalent in Gmail (Tasks are available on Desktop but not mobile) and the mobile compose on Gmail is a blank email.

* Pinning - sticky a reminder or email for easy access and reference later. I guess gmail's equivalent is marking as important or moving to inbox?

In any event, if any of the Inbox team are reading this: big THANK YOU for creating a revolutionary product that was a joy to use. I already submitted feedback through the app wishing it would continue but if there is anything further I can do please share how!

Trips was the killer feature. I hope they port it. The ability to collect all my related information (a particular trip for example) into a single view was genius.

Try Google Trips

Okay, what's the URL?

I think it’s iOS/Android only — which is a pity because a lot of people still prefer a laptop/desktop — although it works well enough for me.

https://get.google.com/trips/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-trips-plan-your-trip/...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

If I can't access my trips from my pc, it's as good as dead for me.

See my comment about Tripit — and there are other alternatives I haven’t tried.

But then I have another company knowing my personal information (dob, etc. etc.).

Don't you can just forward your booking/flight ticket emails to trip it? I don't think you have dob in those type of emails?

I don't mean to be too sarcastic here but what's the point? Google will just shut that down in a few weeks too.

Yet, sadly, accidental sarcasm occurs alarmingly often... :-)

In all honesty, feel free to use something like Tripit — see my response to the parent.

Why use Google Trips? So that they can get you hooked and then close it down? Much like Inbox and many products before that..

It's as if those open source people had a point

From a different perspective, Trips was surprisingly annoying for me! I had a team we're I'd need to approve other people's trips which would automatically show up as my own in calendar etc. This was especially annoying when our trips would overlap to the same destination. Unfortunately, it didn't have an easy way to mark what was my trip and what wasn't in any sort of repeatable fashion.

I hope they'll include a "not my trip" option if they port the feature, (which I hope, it's a godsend when travelling).

Or since they are already parsing the email's contents to create the trip, they could also pay attention to the traveler's name.

Alternatively, you can try Tripit[1] which has more features, but there is definitely more friction involved as you either need to grant access to your email account or manually forward emails.

[1] https://www.tripit.com

I don't know if its just me, but TripIt feels like a polished iPhone app that was begrudgingly ported to Android.

That being said, I'm on Android and do use it to manage all my trip data. Prior to that, I was using various versions of Worldmate.

WorldMate was nice. Another nice alternative — at least as far as apps go — is TripCase.

Everything that tripit does, Kayak does too. I just email all my bookings to trips@kayak.com and it does the rest. (They offer direct email integration, but giving access to my inbox feels icky, and I wouldn't want other people's trip info to end up in my itinerary anyway)

Well, there are alternatives like TripCase, Kayak and many others. TripIt just happens to be the one I’ve used for actual trips.

I use TripIt a lot (manually forwarding emails). I don’t trust them with my email credentials. :-)

I do love the service. Their website design feels aged and worn, but the functionality is great. I love trying out confirmation emails from new travel services to see if they can parse them. And they usually do a good job.

They will almost certainly use oauth to access your email account.

They get given a key to act on your behalf they would never get your actual login details.

Love tripit- the best feature is the calendar feed, I don’t even use the app or website because all of my travel details are always in my calendar.

Tripit is a fantastic service. One great thing about having my last 8 years of flight data logged there is that I can import it to do cool visualizations like: https://openflights.org/user/dankohn1

Click Analyze to see that I've flown 297 flights to 83 unique airports for a total of 539365 miles, which is 2.258x to the moon.

Why not just use a label for a trip and then delete it later (or keep)?

Why do that when Inbox did it automatically for me with no effort on my part?

It's not that I can't organize things myself, it's that it is nice when Inbox does it for me.

The Google Trips app accomplishes the same.

Perhaps Google Trips is what you're looking for: https://get.google.com/trips/

you can use google trips app or search for label:trips in gmail client which have same list. but combination of these is basically the feature in inbox

I've used Trips for years without Inbox. It's an app you can download on the app store/play store and it still automatically creates trips based on your Gmail inbox

Same features in an app from Google too. Google trips https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Most of these things are available in the new Gmail interface.

No they aren't. No automatic bundling of trips and purchases, no reminders (what happens to Inbox reminders?), and the UI is not as uncluttered and simple.

Looks like they transitioned it to a dedicated Tasks app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-tasks-get-things-done...

But, like all of their tasks in the past, those Tasks are in an entirely separate database. So as I see it, there are currently three Google taskesque databases:

- Classic Calendar tasks

- Reminders (Calendar, Inbox, Assistant)

- Tasks (Sidebar in Gmail, Calendar, and Docs)

Correct me if I'm wrong? They merge and create new task databases all the time it seems, so it's hard to keep straight.

The sidebar tasks is the same as the classic tasks, just a new view. If you they will appear on the old tasks interface and on calendar if you add a date.

The third tasks interface is in keep ;)

Reminders also worked with hyperlinks and on Android you can share links with Inbox, saving it for later. Nifty feature and a great way of quickly transferring a link between multiple devices.

I agree. I maintained a pretty clean inbox without 10s of rules. And as you said, never forgot to reply. I actually checked even my promo emails because I had them appear only once a day and I can delete them all in one click after reading them. Google keeps taking away the good products instead of figuring out how to get wider acceptance. Inbox definitely had a learning curve but it was worth it.

If anyone has a good alternative please share

Dealing with promo emails is one thing I'll miss the most, especially pinning the 1 or 2 you might want to keep and then sweeping the rest with 1 click. On desktop gmail you can reproduce this functionality by starring messages you want to keep and then bulk selecting using the "unstarred" option.

The ios gmail app does not have any good answer to this, though. You have to select each email one by one and then delete/archive.

> The ios gmail app does not have any good answer to this, though. You have to select each email one by one and then delete/archive.

This is what kills me about the iOS GMail app compared to Inbox. This feature needs to be ported to GMail before Inbox is gone.

Never used Inbox after an initial look, mainly due to trust issues. How did this work? What if bundles missed an email related to a trip, did you then have to (1) know it went missing, and (2) find it from some hidden place and expend extra time? With these products I get the feeling that it may be amortizing rare occurrences over the most mundane usage.

Emails relating to a trip would get categorized into it automatically. You still had to pay attention. If an email wasn't detected as part of a trip, you dragged it over to the trip and then it was associated correctly.

Maybe it felt mundane to you but I found it extremely handy when landing in a new place, trying to rent a car, and get to my hotel. Just referencing the same little spot in the app was super helpful.

I also found the flight status information helpful. On our last trip, I found out our flight was delayed via Inbox an hour or two before I heard about it from United and was able to make necessary schedule adjustment with the updates.

Totally agree. I add that Inbox doesnt use the read/unread notion (only with bold). Indeed, most of mails can be process without open them.

For reminders I'll usually just send an email to myself, or actually set a reminder through the Android calendar app.

funny how people see things differently

I thought it was complete crap.

I concur, I don't know how I would have managed without it these last 4 years. Done instead of archive just makes so much more sense and it's the simple UI that really stands out as the best feature. Tried the new gmail just now and it's just not as good unfortunately, so much clutter. I'll be sticking with Inbox until the last day. What a shame.

In the hope there is a google employee reading this, i want to shout a big plus one here! The next time the chance to look at the latest Microsoft offering comes up, I’ll do it, using vanilla gmail is just so clunky compared to inbox and i don’t want to go back to it.

Yes. Thank you! Snoozing emails changed my life.

The one thing I miss from Inbox is being able to see my Done/Archived emails in the order archived. (So I can see recently archived emails, even if they're old emails.)

Swipe to snooze would also be nice.

For the first time ever, today I saw a message in Gmail that my email was snoozed.

Is it possible they are just incorporating these features into Gmail? That it was like a safe sandbox for working this stuff out before making at least some of it standard?

Yes. Gmail got Smart Reply, snoozing. Bundles are coming soon, and Smart Compose built on Smart Reply.

> Bundles are coming soon

I'm quite relieved to hear that; do you have a source? It doesn't seem that you work at Google.

The only source I can find is Verge quoting an anonymous PR person for background. https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/12/17848500/google-inbox-shu...

The Gmail client supports email snoozing including the ability to swipe to snooze. Under general settings swipe actions can be configured with Snooze being an option.

Hmm... The only Gmail setting I see is "Show Sender Images", but I use iPhone, so maybe it's a setting just on Android?

Agree! I used Mailbox initially. Since gmail got snoozing in the new design all I’m missing in gmail is snoozing reminders.

From a Gmail PM:

"Thank you to everyone who made Inbox a part of your life. We're taking everything we've learned and rolling it into Gmail."

https://twitter.com/prlambert/status/1039982667989577728

The only Google product that I ever really liked from a usability perspective, and I get to heat they are killing it a month after I discovered it because I bought a new phone.

Just, my, luck.

> UI - simple, uncluttered mobile and desktop experience with uncomplicated keyboard shortcuts. It even had the little things like a satisfying sun animation when your inbox was empty! Desktop Gmail has a surfeit of widgets and add-on icons that perplex, distract, and confuse.

Just for this one in particular, you could try basic HTML mode for GMail: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui

But then of course you get even less features.

So many people say trips was the killer feature - but for me, that was just cool. Snoozing emails to inbox zero. That was my entire system.

Do it now, or when am I most likely to be able to do it?

Cognitive load is a real problem, why would anyone want to see an email that they can do nothing about, above one they can deal with now - and if you just put it in a folder... you have to check that yourself. That's ridiculous. It should remind you - say I'm waiting on package tomorrow before I reply - I shouldn't see the email, or think about it until after the package comes tomorrow. I certainly shoudn't need to remember to look through a custom list, in order to see it.

Google literally revolutionised email, and are now deprecating it - when half the problem was that they rolled it out in a separate and confusing way... Please bring snoozing to Gmail ASAP or I will be so sad.

Ahh I misunderstood. My work instance of gmail is still the old interface. It's so awful to look at after using inbox.

OK I found the upgrade button in the work app. I don't like the gmail interface as much - but it's better than I expected.

Snoozing is already in Gmail :)

Snoozing of emails is a good start, although it seems that I cannot snooze "tasks" only set a date, and to snooze a note in Keep and then not see it (to reduce cognitive load to only things I can action now) - requires setting a reminder and then archiving the note...

I don't get why people want to be able to see everything all the time - or have to check in different places. Showing the notes as items in google inbox was fantastic, as was hiding them when they are snoozed.

I used it for a few months, but was getting so slow I went back to gmail. Gmail is still slow...

Lots of features are possible in the new gmail, but everything is nested in a menu! On the android app you swipe left or right to archive an email (instead of the inbox one way to snooze, one way to archive), and you actually have to open an email, and then click a sub-menu to snooze it!

Even adapting my workflow to the new tools, everything is nested - like you want a note in keep, or a task in tasks (and deciding between the two is not always obvious) - that requires you to go into a sub-menu / sidebar... the UX is so complex, it's really a struggle to be efficient so far.

Ah. Swipe customization. Well I guess that's a little better. It's so feature heavy though. All this stuff is pretty buried.

Maybe Superhuman is opening to the public by then? It sounds promising.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/18/rapportive-founders-new-st...

https://superhuman.com/

If you want some of that back, look into a combination of Boomerang for Gmail (needs a browser extension) and Multiple Inboxes (in advanced tab of gmail settings)

I use Boomerang for all kinds of reminders. For me it works better than Inbox did and it was the reason why I went back to Gmail after trying Inbox for about a month.

I use a multiple inbox pane "is:starred" for pinning emails.

I never really "got" bundles. It was more of an annoyance to me and I prefer manual labeling.

The UI: yeah, it's still Gmail...

I don't mean to throw out the same old "you can't get attached to Google products because they kill them at any time" thing, but holy shit, this one feels like a real kick in the balls. Email is one of my most important workflows and I've spent a great deal of time over the past few years attaching myself to the zero inbox mindset through the bundles feature and having my reminders as first class citizens in the inbox. Going back to Gmail without these features is a serious regression in my life.

I'm not too familiar with it; how is this different from setting a "skip the inbox" filter?

Bundles don't skip the inbox; that's the point. Stuff in your inbox is stuff you haven't had a chance to deal with yet; prematurely moving emails out of your inbox that you haven't had a chance to look at would break that workflow.

not a inbox user, but cannot something similar be done with gmail tabs ?

Maybe. Can you add custom search queries as tabs? Something like "in:label AND in:inbox" would probably be a reasonable substitute (though perhaps a bit more clunky).

Yeah I believe that is possible, most of the stuff you can do in inbox, you can do in Gmail with more control.

that's the thing, after i switched to inbox from gmail i never had to touch that feature. sometimes i'd bump against my old labels/containers in gmail and wonder how i used to live like that. honestly this is depressing

The beauty of inbox was that you didn’t have to set anything up. Promotional emails, newsletters, bills etc just went to the appropriate bundle. 99% of the time it Just Worked.

I mostly use filters for stuff like newsletters where I might look at it and I might not, depending on my mood, but it isn't urgent.

It might be an old critic, but Google truly makes an effort to keep it current. They're simply an unreliable company.

> They're simply an unreliable company

I don't think it's intentional, but it's a side-effect of Google's bonus structure[1]. There's more money to be made (by employees) if their team successfully launches a new product. Maintaining existing products isn't as profitable, in fact, launching and deprecating popular products as frequently as possible is the optimal scenario for maximizing bonuses.

1. From the information I've encountered. I'm not a Googler.

Wow, when I hear about perverse incentives, I don't usually think about people spending their lives showing their clients a taste of a possible future until a high enough reward gets them to stop caring. Reward hacking for humans.

Promotion Driven Development

Shhh, don't tell anyone, it will end up in an Agile Scrum book soon..

The term used by Googlers is embarrassingly similar, "Perf driven development".

I mean that's kinda how most industries work, just replace the word "development" with whatever that industry does

Except the things that a salesman sells don't stop existing once they're promoted, because the company is invested in the products, which Google seems singularly unable to do.

Google is an R&D company really, not a consumer one.

I wonder if I should collect a bunch of these...

Off the top of my head, I've observed:

- Resume Driven Development: wherein enterprise contractors and developers inject as many fad frameworks, architectures, and uncalled for features unnecessarily.

- Vendor Driven Development: wherein the application architecture is tie to a cloud solutions billing model as much as possible.

- Search Engine Driven Development: wherein the code is just a bunch of copy/pasted code that isn't really understood, and doesn't really work together coherently.

- Ignorance Driven Development: wherein a perfectly serviceable solution which is better in every way was not used, simply because the developer saw a problem and immediately went to code, without looking at how everyone else in the world solves the problem.

- Delusion Driven Development: wherein a completely useless application is beautifully crafted based on the obvious delusions of a manager or founder, which have successfully spread to the development team without any critical push-back or data to back the deluded assertions of the authority that has deemed the software necessary.

Don't forget my favorite, Panic Driven Development

Chef Ego Officer driven Development

Autocomplete Driven Development: when you don't know the language that well yet, but IDE-support is superb.

Hope Driven Development - everything sucks right now, but it must get better. Right? RIGHT?

Mortgage driven development - where the developer didn’t want to be there.

I never even tried Inbox because I didn't trust that it wouldn't get killed. Ironically I was just thinking about finally giving it a try since it survived longer than I expected.

You've won this round...

I logged in for the first time to see what it was.. same deal here, have stopped adopting new Google products since 2013 (the Reader debacle naturally)

Lol, that's such a strange approach.

Just adopt the new services, and if they disappear, use something else.

What do we exist to persist these days and how long for?

I'm sorry you maintain such a low opinion of yourself, but just like my lifespan, my attention is finite and I consider it priceless. If I'm forced to burn energy on something it better be for my long-term benefit, because let's face it, either of us could be dead tomorrow, and let's not waste our last breath cursing the fact we spent our final day alive on a new e-mail client, or in servitude to some other bullshit tool.

Google have broken that trust on countless occasions, and as a consequence for half a decade they have been deprived of the opportunity to waste any more of my time. You should consider doing the same

Yep. I was reluctant to try it for this very reason. I just started using it recently, and started liking it. Now I realize that, of course, I shouldn't have bothered.

If only I could easily use something like notmuch/isync on my phone...

I guess it wasn't harvesting any unique information about its users. Thus... shutdown.

Yeah, I thought Inbox would actually be safe to use since it was tied to email, but nope.

Gmail doesn't have the automated bundling features that Inbox does, and like you, losing Inbox will be a pretty significant blow to my ability to manage email.

I've been slowly migrating away from Google's services for a long time now because they keep pulling stunts like this - it's like they're completely unable to keep their engineers focused on maintaining any kind of product consistency or long-term support.

Android Pie's awful UI/UX changes and discontinuing Inbox are very nearly the last straw for me. I can't avoid Gmail entirely as I'm too attached to the address, but worst case I can always just forward to a new one.

Same here. Their quality control (even on vanilla Android) has been terrible. Play Music is so broken at times and even Gmail has lots of bugs now. Search and Chrome are some of the only consistently reliable things they do now.

Pretty sure they are abandoning Play Music as well. YT Music -> Youtube Music is probably going to be the future.

I was just about to say basically the same thing. This move only reinforces the same thing that really the only consumer products that are safe are Gmail and Docs (G Suite, essentially). Anything else is basically a psychological experiment into how humans deal with loss of a beloved technology.

This is really unfortunate. Inbox's primary differentiator was never in any one individual feature like Snooze or Smart Reply. No, the real value of Inbox was that its design was built around a fundamentally different philosophy on what email is and how it should be managed.

Gmail takes a traditional approach to email management. Messages come in, you read them, maybe organize them with labels, then archive them, delete them, or just leave them in your inbox forever. It doesn't really make any assumptions about your workflow, it just gives you a bunch of fairly standard email client features and leaves it up to you how you use them.

Inbox on the other hand is very opinionated. It was designed around the idea that your inbox is a to-do list, and everything from the UI to features like pinning, snooze, and reminders is built around that assumption. Emails come in and get sorted into categories, then you go through that list triage them, marking emails that require no action as done, pinning the ones you want to deal with soon, and snoozing the ones you want to come back to later. You can even attach reminders to emails so you don't forget what task they represent. When you're done you hit the sweep button and everything that isn't pinned or snoozed gets wiped clean.

As a result of this workflow, emails you've already dealt with are hidden away in the "done" folder, leaving only emails in your inbox which represent reminders or tasks you have yet to complete. You can even add custom reminders to Inbox which aren't tied to any specific email. Basically it turns your inbox into a to-do list.

I'm saddened to see Inbox go. Gmail doesn't really capture this workflow with quite the same level of elegance Inbox does; it just wasn't designed to work that way. I suspect that long after Inbox is gone I'll still find myself using the workflow it taught me; treating my inbox like a to-do list even when the client I use is no longer built around that workflow.

Exactly this is the key difference and what I'll miss. I really hope they add a "Inbox mode" to Gmail... Which they'll probably don't.

> Gmail takes a traditional approach to email management. Messages come in, you read them, maybe organize them with labels, then archive them, delete them, or just leave them in your inbox forever.

Not that long ago, gmail was a radically new way to deal with email.

1) aggregating emails from a single conversation in your inbox - yes, on the old days, every incoming email was a line in your inbox.

2) providing archive functionality - no need to organise and file your old emails, just click archive and use the search later if you find you'll need them

You forgot 3- a search function that worked well and instantaneously. and you kind of covered it, but just to make it explicit- provided what was practically unlimited storage for the time- 2GB. Competitors were offering 5, maybe 10MB. I remember people hacking together a file system out of it because that was so astoundingly large for the time.

The fact that gmail is now taken for granted is quite interesting though, it really was astoundingly revolutionary at the time and really built the halo image around Google.

IIRC gmail was also the first popular mail reader to use tags rather that folders to classify emails.

Threading in email clients has been around for decades. Actually I must check if there are mobile versions of mutt or elm.

And they thread properly. Unlike Gmail's bastardised 'We munge your subjects and think these are related'.

I considered implementing the Mutt threading algorithm in a browser extension for GMail. It's one of those "If I ever have less to do, I'll give it a shot" ideas that will never get done :)

> not that long ago

GMail was new 14 years ago. I think that's a pretty long time no matter how old you are.

> Inbox on the other hand is very opinionated. It was designed around the idea that your inbox is a to-do list, and everything from the UI to features like pinning, snooze, and reminders is built around that assumption.

Yeah this is a massive gut punch for that reason. Inbox is how I organize my life right now. I reply to myself, snooze emails for a specific day, track bills, all through Inbox. Say what you will about becoming too dependent on technology, but Inbox was really the first tool I had where I felt I had TODOs figured out, so that I wouldn't miss doing important tasks. This scares me a lot. Hopefully gmail is configurable to pick up a lot of the slack.

Web apps are programs running on other peoples machines that you have no control over. If you enjoy the use of software and you don't even have the power to choose to downgrade when you don't like an upgrade, you're in a very poor position indeed. You're here on hacker news, you shouldn't be scared. This is just another reminder that Richard Stallman was right and an opportunity to form a community to create a replacement that respects user freedoms.

Why whenever some software service goes down is there somebody chastising everyone for trusting a third party? That's how the world works. I trust the cities to keep the roads open. I trust the province to keep the hospitals staffed. I trust the farmers to produce my food, the engineers to inspect the buildings I'm in, the mechanic to keep my car on the raod, the police to keep my neighbourhood safe. Why is it when all of a sudden it's software, I'm not allowed to put my trust in a third party? I delegate responsibility for things in my life. I don't see stopping that as improving my quality of life.

If you want to maintain your own email server as a hobby, go for it. I have different things I want to do with that time.

You trusting a lot of _well regulated_ industries and government run services is one matter. Blithely grouping them all together at all, let alone comparing them with software, is another thing altogether.

Setting aside the comparison you're trying to make, there are a lot of choices you can make. You can choose to rely on a web app hosted by a third party to secure all of your data and provide you with a consistent service. I think time and time again this is proven to be the most foolish choice, at least if you truly believe the service will continue to be provided. You can also choose to rely on third party services implementing common standards (i.e. POP and IMAP) and allow interchangeable third parties to provide services while your day to day interactions with your computer are managed by software that you run yourself. That software doesn't have to be open source or free. When you have purchased a license tied to a physical installation medium you are still in a better position to control how you choose to use your computer compared to being completely dependent on whatever trustusoksoftware.com is serving up today. Free software is best of all, but isn't the only alternative to web applications.

Anyways, I will come back around and address you on your own terms after all. You can draw parallels between open standards and the regulations governing all the services you claim are nothing more than time savers. You can also draw parallels between the civic duty to vote and take an active interest in the health of your society to the need to push for open standards and free software that respects user rights. Well functioning societies didn't pop up like mushrooms after rain overnight, and they don't continue to work without constant maintenance (not mere delegation of trust to third parties). Software needs to be treated as seriously as everything else you rely on. Personally you can save your time and ignore these issues entirely, but you can't just off hand compare anyone concerned with the current state of software freedom to being a model train builder and laugh it off as a waste of time.

> Outside of some of the bundling features

Bundling (in the inbox) is THE reason for using Inbox. It's the only unique feature. It's the thing that changed how I use email.

If I use folders it's the kiss of death for any email that a rule sends to that folder. I want a single list but with some items collapsed.

Email went from unthreaded to threaded (reducing the complexity massively.

Bundles takes that one step further.

In both cases the critical thing is one ordered list but with a massively reduced number of individual items.

and pinning!

Pinning was basically starring with a ui toggle, right?

No, it also allows you instantly archive everything in your Inbox without touching the important, pinned stuff.

I'm using it to pin important stuff, and switch between the important and standard views.

it's so useful

Doesn't simple tagging solve all the same problems?

Tagging requires constant manual intervention, I gave up trying to use tags years ago.

Smart, rule-based tagging which condenses multiple items down to a single row in my main inbox and allows granular control over when they surface then yeah.

Oh wait. That's bundles...

Looks like this was meant to be in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17971740

Same thing here !!

I don't want to go back to gmail, now it looks like a complete mess compared to Inbox.

Should I start writing a replacement client ? :///

> Should I start writing a replacement client ? :/

Please do.

Yes, pleeeease do. I can't even imagine what I'm going to do come next year March :(

Let me know when you get started; make it open source. I'm so down to help

I literally just logged into gmail instead of inbox for the first time in years now that I'm forced to migrate and... all I can say is wtf this mess. inbox was just about perfect. I'm going to miss bundles.

I'll buy a copy

Please please please

Snooze is the main reason I've been using Inbox.

That's in gmail now.

but it's no longer a single swipe - this was the best part of the Inbox snooze feature.

You can choose what to swipe left or right. Just found out.

Only on Android

Edison Mail has this and most features are talking about in here

Looks like a mobile-only app. I need something that runs in a browser as well. In fact - more so. I do most email management on my laptop.

I hate bundling.

They pushed it for all the github emails, and I had to unbundle them, separately for each github repo, super annoyingn.

> They pushed it

No. You didn't turn off the automatic categories. It's a single checkbox in settings.

My only bundles are the ones I've created and they work exactly how I want them.

Is there another way how to organise reminders in the inbox.

These are really unfortunate news! :(

My stress level just went up after opening gmail.com after few years since I switched to Inbox.

Being used to just swiping emails that I didn't need to attend, I didn't realize they were still in "unread" status.

Now when I opened Gmail, I see:

    Social          190
    Updates       4,856
    Forums        3,329
    Promotions    4,214

The worst part is that I cannot see which of those "Unread" emails are pinned in Inbox.

And.. we cannot Pin emails in Gmail the same way as in Inbox :( [I have already read the "Pin emails" section in https://support.google.com/inbox/answer/9117840, but starring/labeling/searching doesn't give the convenience that Inbox pinning did.]

I'll also miss all the rich email rendering of emails like shipping tracking, flight tickets, appointments, etc.

Alas..

---

Update: And of course Google would discontinue Inbox. Inbox did not have ads, but Gmail has freaking ads!

what's wrong with leaving emails unread?

For me, it’s because I can’t stand having meaningless ‘5,423’ badges littering the icons on my home screen.

We've been conditioned to have that reaction. (That's also why they're red.) Unread-badges are designed to make you open the app, thus increasing the amount of time spent in the app.

Freudian slip: I accidentally wrote "the time spent in the ad" on the first try. :)

yeah but every service you sign up for now has newsletters/mailing lists and constantly sends you semi relevant spam with the occasional gem that you can't instantly consign to the rubbish bin. inbox was so simple for dealing with things like that

You don't really miss anything by throwing every newsletter straight in the spam folder, the worst that will happen is that you hear life-changing news a day late. It will not kill you.

Noooooo, please just unsubscribe. I only sign up for newsletters I actually want to have delivered to my email but every once in a blue moon I notice that a newsletter went to spam instead of my inbox and invariably the reason given is "It is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past." which to me means that other people marked it as spam instead of properly just unsubscribing.

I understand that it used to be very difficult or impossible to unsubscribe from stuff, but nowaways it's easier than ever as emails are basically required to have a one or two click unsubscribe system.

I get plenty of "newsletters" I never signed up for. Those deserve to be marked as spam. I can't trust that the unsubscribe link isn't used to harvest email addresses that are still in active use, so clicking one of those links is a net negative for me.

Hm, but if you marked them as "done" in inbox they should have been archived in gmail and not show as "unread" on the app icon as that only shows unread in inbox? That's they way it works for me at least. I use inbox and gmail both as apps on my iPhone and in the browser. I've been archiving and marked e-mails as "done" without reading them for years and never had this problem.

It's just as "meaningless" as having any other number badge on your home screen...

I don't like incorrect unread counts lying around.

I then cannot distinguish between truly unread emails and the emails that I swiped as Done in Inbox, but still left unread in Gmail.

The unread count is correct; you didn't really _read_ those emails. The problem is that the UI is placing undue emphasis on the number of emails you didn't read; that's a pretty irrelevant statistic. Half of the emails I receive don't need to be read; just glancing at the subject is enough.

Inbox got it right by not showing unread counts and just letting you mark emails as done when they're no longer needed.

Under your definition, the unread count is too low. Gmail counts something as read after you load its contents, not after you read it.

If they'd kept it as a flagship, bet those ads would be in there.

Dear user of product 'X' that you've come to depend on for your daily workflow and that you are completely happy with. To serve you better we have decided to kill of 'X' and force you into 'Y' which does some of 'X' but worse and will kill your workflow for the next couple of months, and will give you a lot of extra work to do besides. Of course 'Y' does not look the same - nor does it act the same - as 'X' but we are super excited to have an opportunity to force some change on you, the user, just because we value you so much and we really would never make a change like this as a way to cut costs. Best regards, your ever caring and loving supplier.

Wow! I haven’t used regular Gmail in years! It will be a pain to switch back. The whole bundling, scheduling, snoozing, pinning, reminders etc are really useful.

But then it’s Google. The key people probably got bored and moved on and perhaps no one else is willing to take it up. At least they didn’t make 10 different email products like they did with IM.

Any suggestions for alternative email clients for iOS/Android (other than Gmail app) which works well with Gmail? The iOS client doesn’t work well with Gmail. I’m looking for something which has as many as possible features from Inbox and doesn’t mess up my inbox — i.e. no Mail Pilot.

I recently switched back to Gmail from Inbox (before this announcement) and was pleasantly surprised that most of the features from Inbox were there. I barely had to change my workflow.

I like the way Inbox handles certain kind emails differently —- e.g. it extracts relevant data from newsletters, tickets, receipts, order confirmations, package tracking emails etc. so they are available at a quick glance. A quick glance tells me that is not the case with Gmail — correct me if I am mistaken.

Ah yes, I don't think those features made it, but I never found that to be the killer feature anyway. Perhaps someone can remake those, now that Gmail has a proper marketplace for add-ons.

Do the addons work in the mobile apps or is it just browser things?

so now i have to pay for features that were previously bundled as part of the product...why exactly would i do that for a free email service?

Yep this is the biggest thing I'll miss. For example Inbox can automatically recognize a flight confirmation email and turn it into a rich card with supplemental information that wasn't even in the original email, stuff like the flight status and gate.

Additionally, the mobile app is amazing at deep linking back to the right place in another app. For example it can recognize a Seamless food order receipt and deep link back into the Seamless app to view the order status.

For iOS I just stick with the native Mail.app to be honest.

It works well enough for regular IMAP or Exchange accounts, but there is something messed up with Google’s implementation of IMAP which causes the experience to be sub-par. Also, Mail.app doessn’t have anywhere near feature parity with Inbox.

Hence it makes the decision to move to Fastmail, which has standards compliant IMAP, so much easier.

Google's ADHD with products strikes again. It's really hard to get excited over new Google offerings because they just go away when Google gets bored of them, time and time again.

It's likely not google get bored, but users didn't adapt product on large enough scale.

I wonder what scale would have been enough. According to the play store it has over 10 million installs

Could that just mean 1 million people installed it 10 times?

Maybe but I still think there's more than that. There's 400,000 reviews, so even if they're counting people that install it multiple times it's probably not a 10:1 ratio. Also I think "10 million+" on the play store means 10,000,000 - 50,000,000, and that doesn't count iOS and web users.

Another important question is what is a retention rate.

Possibly, but even then... 1 million users is a lot. I don’t think I’d ever sleep if one of my apps had 1M MAUs.

That's 1% of Gmail's 1 billion installs, again according to Play, to compare apples with apples.

That's as clear a sign as you can expect that users don't want Inbox, notwithstanding a noisy minority like us.

It is a cycle. Google drops a product due to low uptick, so users don't take on further products. There are three products that I can think of that have lasted: search, email, ads (which is search, really).

[edit] oh, and maps!

Voice. I've been using Voice for probably 10 years now. Most of the functionality has been subsumed by Hangouts, but it's still there and they even updated it within the last year.

Shhhh! I'm convinced Voice only stays because it's under the radar of upper management. Don't remind them it exists!

It would be very unfortunate for me to lose my default phone number...

Interesting.

I wonder if any regulations around phone numbers is actually what it protecting Voice from getting nuked from CEO orbit.

Chrome?

It could very well be the other way around too: product is getting too popular and doesn't have ads, but directly competes with our product that does have ads.

Reader/iGoogle didn't have ads, but stopped you from visiting places that did have ads.

Inbox didn't have ads, but was directly pulling users away from gmail which does.

Google Docs? Calendar? Groups? YouTube? Plus Android and Chrome, of course.

Search.

They bought Youtube and it served Ads. Calendar is part of Gmail. Groups is pretty much dead and hasn't been upgraded in years. Android and Chrome are part of Ads. Docs is probably the only new feature that they've developed, but people pay a good amount of money for it.

How is Chrome a part of ads?

Docs was an acquisition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs,_Sheets,_and_Slide...

Chrome is analytics, not ads, but the two go hand in hand.

> users didn't adapt product on large enough scale

Because users know it wont be a product that gets any updates and will be shutdown in 2 years.

Not to mention that it launched with a lot of missing features that existed in Gmail.

None of which I missed. I'm a poweruser in most of my computer interactions, but e-mail isn't one of them. I actually really liked Inbox's restricted feature set.

I liked Inbox but didn't want to use it because I expected it to get discontinued.

If 10 million users doesn't warrant keeping a product around even if unsupported, I don't know what is...

> It's likely not google get bored, but users didn't adapt product on large enough scale.

What exactly is a "large enough scale"?

The mentality that a project is a failure unless it achieves exponential growth and massive world-eating scale needs to die in a fire.

Even small things have value, and one of the few good things about massive corporations is they have the resources to do a lot small things well. When you have 85,000 employees, focus is overrated.

> When you have 85,000 employees, focus is overrated.

probably less than half of them are engineers, and about 20% of them are capable to build complex systems. And now Google has quite long list of technologically complex products: search, ads, youtube, android. I think density of complex projects per capita may be much higher at Google than in other companies.

> Even small things have value, and one of the few good things about massive corporations is they have the resources to do a lot small things well. When you have 85,000 employees, focus is overrated.

I like to think I understand the sentiment, but I think the reality is a bit more nuanced than that.

Inbox and GMail in all likeliness are in the same product area (PA) and thus at some point in the chain they report to the same person.

That being the case, if Inbox takes even 1/2 the time of this manager that GMail takes, then it's really not worth it because GMail easily has more than 10x the users.

My guess is that they will try to take all the things people liked about Inbox and bring them to GMail over time. They probably want to shut down Inbox before that happens so they can use more engineering resources to make that transition more quickly and also so that the tech stack is simpler by not having to support two different products.

The reason I didn't adopt Inbox (for Android) initially was that it only worked for GMail whereas the regular GMail client also worked with 3rd party mail accounts.

I was also extremely hesitant because of Google's history of canning experimental apps and Inbox simply isn't integral enough to be safe from the routine culling (unlike e.g. Chrome or Maps).

I was an early adopter for Wave (which ended up going nowhere because nobody I knew wanted to give it a try and I didn't have enough invites to hand them out without knowing people would use them). I tried to get on Orkut but never got an invite (until it had already basically become the "Facebook of South America"). I strongly believed in Google+ as a potential Facebook killer and used it early on. I was also an avid user of Reader in the Web 2.0 days.

At this point, I no longer trust new Google products. Google seems to really want me to use Duo, for example, but nobody I know is eager to use it and I won't talk my friends into using it if it's not clear that it's here to stay. I'm not committing to any Google product if I don't have reason to believe they won't pull the rug whenever they please.

> Google seems to really want me to use Duo, for example, but nobody I know is eager to use it and I won't talk my friends into using it if it's not clear that it's here to stay.

Not to dismiss the rest of your point which is totally valid and a well deserved criticism, but you can use Duo to call people with Android phones even if they don't have Duo, so you don't actually need to convince them to use it.

Ironical in this particular case, as inbox was the first mail client that helped my ADHD-PI brain keep a reasonably clean inbox, while still actually responding to people.

Everyone suspected it for a while. Their active Twitter account refused for months to say when the app would be updated for the iPhone X.

Personally, I suspect that they painted themselves into a bit of a corner with the tech stack they choose for Inbox. They used a unique C++ to JS compiler to run Inbox in the browser. This worked decently well in Chrome, but the experience in other browsers has been a lot choppier. It's possible the same codebase was also compiled to iOS and this is what caused the very long delay in updating for the iPhone X.

I'm sad to see it go. The UX in the official Gmail app isn't quite as good. The bundle workflow they developed for working through your inbox is something I haven't seen elsewhere.

When you have a successful product people love, you don't sunset it because the tech stack is too cumbersome.

This has to mean that the product wasn't seeing the adoption they were hoping for.

You might if you find yourself developing duplicate features in parallel in two different codebases.

I'm sure it's a little bit of both, right? If 99% of Gmail users had voluntarily migrated to Inbox, I'm quite certain it would not be getting shut down. That doesn't preclude that there is a significant contingent out there that loves Inbox.

(BTW the same goes for the old HN hobby-horse, Reader. If it had had a billion users, it would never have gotten shut down.)

Love don't pay the bills.

If the product isn't helping the bottom line, companies will sunset it. "Free beer" would be the most widely adopted offering a bar could have, but it's not going to be good business for the bar.

> love don't pay the bills

Thats not always true especially with Google. Anything that helps tighten the already tight grip they have on users directly affects the bottom line.

That's sad. I would pay to use inbox.

Well, you're talking about product strategy in context of google..

>They used a unique C++ to JS compiler to run Inbox in the browser

I would love to read some reasoning behind that. I'm really trying to come up with pro arguments but can't.

There was no C++ to JS compiler used, it was Java compiled to Closure Compiler (J2CL) and Java compiles to Objective-C (j2objc)

However only business logic is transpiled, the UI layer on every platform is written by hand in the native impedance matched language of the platform.

Ah, that's right, thanks for correcting me.

J2CL is much much faster than average react js code. Even testing converted port of bouncy castle's RSA and AES was faster than google's crypto.js

It's really interesting to see the super-knee jerk reaction here when the article itself even says that most of the features made their way into gmail.

(I was a heavy inbox user, and i am happy with the stuff that made it's way into gmail).

Outside of some of the bundling features, i'm curious what actual difference people are complaining about here.

People are complaining about having to switch apps. Users have found something that works and they've gotten used to it. Now they'll be forced to switch for no apparent value add. Why do you think people would be okay with that?

That isn't the part i'm commenting on.

It's a general statement on the world that people hate all change :)

People have always argued literally every change has no value add for them (and i'm sure for large enough things, there are always people for which that is true).

So that part doesn't bug me.

But that's not what most of the comments seem to be. Because honestly, if the only complaint people have is "i had to open a different app", that's actually really good for any transition.

Change ...

- causes uncertainty (will this still work?);

- often comes at an inconvenient time;

- requires the user to re-learn the software;

- might cause incompatibilities with existing tools.

No wonder people mostly don't like updates, especially if they are forced upon them, and if the advantages are not clear.

Imho, to address the above points, software should let the user decide when they perform the update, and the user should always be allowed to switch back. Note that this might require data to be migrated back and forth, but of course that's the vendor's problem.

Come on. It's one of the essential, fundamental apps/services for many people with all the strong feelings attached to that. For a Googler to show up and start publicly calling users' reactions 'kneejerk' (completely independent of the accuracy of the claim) and then go on to philosophizing broadly on the nature of change amounts to trolling.

Once again Stallman shows that he was right all along.

Deleting/sweeping a section of emails away on mobile is a huge productivity boost for me. The Gmail app on Android doesn't have this feature from what I can tell.

Snooze was a big one too, but that got crippled in Inbox a while ago as well.

The ability to mark emails as done or to pin them were hallmark features of the Inbox interface and they both take significantly more work in Gmail. I'm severely disappointed that they've decided to axe Inbox without at least pretending to care - by eg. providing a user survey.

Oh no, pinning! I've so thoroughly integrated that into my expectations and behavior that I didn't even think about it.

Ack, that just hit me now, too.

I don't use Inbox -- what does pinning accomplish?

Inbox builds on a set of useful primitive ideas, but understanding them is necessary to understand pinning's value.

The central idea of Inbox is that your goal is INBOX ZERO, and that after dealing with any email, you swipe it to the side (or mark it as Done with the checkmark in the web UI) and _do not see it again_. (Like 'Archive' in Gmail.)

The second idea is that your emails are Bundled by category. This is similar to a tag or a filter, but you can choose to have them still show (as a bundle) in the inbox, rather than being filtered to not-seen oblivion. For example, I had one bundle for Pull Requests, another for Jira notifications. The app auto-categorizers things for Finances, Promos, etc, so many of the spam-like newsletters you get will end up bundled together. (Bundles default to only showing things that are not Done, unless you click a bundle's category on the left navigation bar.)

That doesn't sound very useful. What makes it useful is that you can archive/Done an entire category. All of those emails from TeeFury, Newegg, Amazon, Steam, Github, etc that you would normally consider usually-clutter suddenly are SUPER easy to deal with. It basically makes archiving those no longer annoying, as you can do it all at once. Best of all, you see them first, so it's harder to have something get filtered without being noticed.

Pinning prevents you from archiving an item (unless you explicitly click it). This means that you can ping something in a bundle, archive the bundle, and it will archive all the other things, and leave the bundle with that one item visible.

I am profoundly saddened that Inbox is going away. As others have said, it _changed my life_ in terms of how I dealt with overwhelming email volumes at work.

Marking emails as done is just as easy in gmail as it was in inbox (I switched back a while ago). In inbox, swiping to "done" is equivalent to applying the archived label, which you can (in android and web, though apparently not ios), have swiping/closing the email do.

How do you mark a large list of emails as archived/deleted in Android?

Do you mean like selecting multiple (which I believe is possible, but I don't have the gmail app handy to check) and then labelling them all together, or like swiping a bundle away (which there is nothing analogous to I don't believe)

This is what I'm going to miss most. Heard the news and went to check the Gmail app only to realize I was going to have to spend much more time in my inbox.

I was bothered about the same thing but it looks like in the Gmail app you can configure the left/right swipes separately to "Archive", "Delete", "Mark as read/unread", "Move to", "Snooze" and "None". The default seems to be both set to "Archive".

>It's really interesting to see the super-knee jerk reaction here when the article itself even says that most of the features made their way into gmail.

We didn't just want "most [Inbox] features into gmail". We wanted Inbox's UI and basic approach further developed.

Again, i don't see most comments saying that here.

Can confirm that what I want is Inbox's UI. The ease of postponing items into the "Snoozed" queue, and low-effort addition of task items, are both lacking from the stock GMail app.

I just checked and you can actually set swipe left to snooze in the gmail app now.

It’s not available in the iOS app.

Not surprising, developing new features for iOS isn't Google's highest priority, they're targeting where most of the installed userbase is.

Similar effects can be seen in the OTT market. Roku gets new features from Sling, Netflix and the other OTT players first, with Chromecast and Fire TV lagging by months or years, and these 2nd tier players are missing Amazon Prime Video (Chromecast) or YouTube (Fire TV) respectively. It seems much like the music sales market IMO...

Heh, HN is great at downvoting without making a counterargument :P

The first is available in gmail :)

Pressing `T` bringing up the reminders dialog and quickly adding a TODO, then being able to snooze it for a later date.

Gmail has `Tasks`, but I'm not aware of it showing up in the same stream as emails.

> Outside of bundling

Bundling is the main development that Inbox brought to the table.

Going to the video tape:

https://gmail.googleblog.com/2014/10/an-inbox-that-works-for...

Three things are highlighted:

Extraction of info from items and display (now in gmail)

Bundles (some made it into gmail)

Reminders, assists, and Snooze (now mostly in gmail)

So i'm not sure i'd agree with you here, but i definitely would agree that of the big three, bundling made it in the least :)

How can I get bundles in Gmail? Am I missing something?

Settings -> Inbox -> Categories is analogous, although IMO the UI isn't as nice. I also don't know if that lets you do custom bundles, although that's a feature I never used in Inbox.

Edit: and the gmail version of bundles has fewer categories than Inbox does

Sorry, not even close. Categories is just automatic folders, every email client has had folders for decades.

Is there a difference, other than bundles are inline with your other emails and categories are accessed in separate tabs?

You cannot create custom categories, you're limited to the 5 options Gmail provides you.

You can't archive all in one swipe.

I for example have all promo emails "queue" up whenever they come in and show up at 9am every day.

I have all "low priority" emails show up at 5pm when I'm winding down my workday to deal with them.

That's the kind of thing I'm going to miss the most.

Is this in the gmail android app? How come I don't see any of this stuff?

> Bundles (some made it into gmail)

Where? “Categories” were in Gmail before Inbox, but there still doesn't seem to be any way to get them bundled in the inbox the way Inbox’s primary display does, though you can set them as separate inboxes.

Inbox users have had all of this and more since 2014, though. And even if Gmail has some of these features the interface is not nearly as natural for using them.

> Outside of some of the bundling features, i'm curious what actual difference people are complaining about here.

Gmail’s horribly cluttered interface compared to Inbox, both on web and mobile.

The reason I still use Inbox on Android, even when GMail has most of the same features is its interface design. I much prefer Inbox's approach where the emphesis is on the email subject instead of GMail's emphesis on sender. 90% of my emails are with the same 2-3 colleauges. They represent different threads for different projects and tasks. Gmail interface makes finding the right email cumbersome. I will continue using Inbox until it stops working.

I never used Inbox, but this seems like another sign that Google has moved to the next stage in the corporate life cycle; they don't need a testbed for innovative features because they're no longer in the innovation business.

Just because they've finished with the features Inbox was a testbed for (which I am deeply disappointed by because Inbox is so much better than Gmail as a daily driver) doesn't mean they are abandoning that kind of testing approach and have no further use for it.

Gmail doesn't have reminders - and my reminders that I've saved and snoozed, many of which are past March of next year will apparently just disappear once Inbox is sunsetted?

Bundling (including the "Trips") is the only reason I still use any google web client. It's not trivial.

same here. trips bundling the one killer feature why I use inbox. I really hope it makes its way into gmail before they discontinue it

I'm with you. That's the only way I'd use gmail. When traveling it's so handy to open up the trips and get all your flight/car rental/hotel details in one small space.

I get a ton of email and Inbox does a good job of popping a notification for only the truly important ones. Regular Gmail has the "important" flag which you can train but I get the sense it's not using the same signals or the same algo.

I'm mostly annoyed by the change because the new GMail site takes up twice as much RAM as the already RAM-hungry Inbox site. It's enormous.

Hitting sweep to immediately clear my inbox of all the crap in it that doesn't need dealing with.

Trips.

Using pinning to effect a simple TODO list.

Unread counts. They make me anxious. I have Inbox only show emails sent to me. Everything else gets bundled and up at 8AM. Inbox doesn't show unread counts anywhere. I don't have to feel like I'm constantly behind.

I think the important point for me is not like "This is a nice to have" or "I don't like extra clicking" it's "This affects my actual health." Literally, it's my health. Not doing this makes people who have mental illnesses like anxiety more unwell.

Could you disclose your affiliation in such threads, please?

(Unless you have moved, in which case I'm sorry)

Reminders aren't in Gmail, are they? I don't like having to check two inboxes, multiple times a day. Do you know why Google didn't add reminders to Gmail?

You also seem to believe that more features are always better, but part of Inbox's charm was that it wasn't bloated like Gmail.

I think by now it would be worth for Google to re-think their branding strategy. How about releasing new experimental products off-brand? Google by now has a reputation of discontinuing products (some very vocal) users love.

This makes it very difficult for new Google-branded products to gain traction. Especially if the onboarding is costly & discontinuation would hurt a lot (e.g. Google Cloud, Dart, productivity apps, …).

Another approach could be to build a brand around their 'enterprise' offerings with SLAs & LTS and make it more explicit which products are covered and which aren't.

https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation

Formal list of products covered under deprecation policy

Something like this for all products (beyond cloud) & as part of the overall branding strategy would be super useful to protect the brand.

Good point. Another way is to release new products as "Experimental". When you try to use one for the first time, you'll get a big red warning saying this product may be discontinued any time. Any product that Google is committed to wouldn't have this experimental label.

That way, Google can keep trying things out, early adopters who want them can use them, and the rest of us can keep away. Everyone's happy. Google will stop hurting themselves by developing a reputation that none of their products can be depended on to stick around.

Both your strategy and mine require Google to first be clear about what they want to commit to. Currently, they're not — they just throw things at the wall to see what sticks, but that's hurting their reputation, so they need to do better.

This is so bad for my productivity. I will be missing:

- Reminders (with the ability to snooze them)

- Inbox bundling for promo, social, trips etc.

- Pinning and archiving everything that is not pinned

- Android 'Add reminder' widget

Any ideas on how to replace these are welcome

some ideas

- regular gmail now has snooze too

- reminders can be set in google cal (at least on mobile) and in assistant and from search box

Unfortunately Google assistant doesn't use Google keep for shopping list, so it's unusable for me. I have to use the uh... "Google now"... thing...

Fuck me if I can keep track of Google product names.

I agree. I'll gladly pay for a new email service that has these features. Been looking for a good reason to get off google's email (for security reasons), and this looks like a great kick in the butt to do so.

A few months ago, I realized how important reminders had become to me. Knowing that Inbox might disappear someday, I switched to Todoist and began adding all new reminders (tasks) there. Apart from the lack of integration with Inbox (which is now a moot point), it is a straight upgrade.

* You can still sync reminders to your Google Calendar (tasks appear as events on the date they are due). Edits made in the calendar will be synced back to Todoist.

* Tasks can be assigned sub-tasks

* Tasks can be organized into projects

* You can create complex filters

Of course, if you want to keep things simple, that's an option too and for the most part, I've avoided the fancy features.

Google calendar has reminders baked in - does todoist leverage those? Or are items just "events?"

Not trying to be facetious or anything, but honestly I wonder why at this point anybody would bother using any Google product besides the triumvirate of Search/Maps/Gmail.

What's the point?

Calendar is the only thing I've found that integrates really well with absolutely everything

Sheets is neat too.

Uh, most useful features of Inbox have made it into GMail at this point.

(I was an exclusively-inbox user for quite a while)

I'm happy just using gmail now that the features are there.

I tried some of the extra bundling features and just didn't find them that useful. It was kind of nice but not so nice that i really miss it.

> Uh, most useful features of Inbox have made it into GMail at this point.

Inbox’s basic organization hasn't, and that's it's key useful feature and the one most of the rest build on.

Drive...

Oh, you mean Google One?

Nah they mean Docs pretty sure ;)

While you're not being "facetious" you're being "glib".

Inbox was obviously a place the gmail team used for experimentation and now they are folding it back in.

Besides you're making it sound like there was some huge cost involved in adopting or in abandoning Inbox, which there isn't.

>Inbox was obviously a place the gmail team used for experimentation

What was "obvious" about it? Here's how Google introduced it: "Inbox by Gmail is a new app from the Gmail team. Inbox is an organized place to get things done and get back to what matters. Bundles keep emails organized."

Do you see anything about it being an "experiment" to eventually throw away? Not to mention Gmail already had the Labs feature for experiments.

In fact, what 2 Google representatives had said at the time was:

""We hope, in the long run, that most of our users will be on Inbox." (Alex Gawley)

"We care deeply about Gmail and Gmail users, but in the long run, as we add more features to Inbox and respond to user feedback, we hope that everyone will want to use Inbox instead of Gmail. Ultimately, our users will decide." (Jason Cornwell, Inbox's lead designer)

I couldn't have said it better myself! They tried to sell it as the possible evolution of Gmail. Not some 'experiment' that would partially flow into the Gmail they asked us to abandon for Inbox in the first place.

"Ultimately, our users will decide."

You've repeatedly created accounts with a propaganda agenda for Google. You've been doing it for years. We've banned you many times before, and I've banned this account. Doing this is a serious abuse of HN, regardless of the company you're promoting or what your motive is. Would you please stop?

HN is for curious humans to exchange thoughts in community. It's hard to imagine anything that undermines curiosity or community worse than this. We frequently ask users not to accuse each other of astroturfing or shilling without evidence, but when we do find evidence—and there's a lot of it in this case—we come down hard pretty quickly.

Keep is really handy.

Keep is the next app that I expect to get axed. It's amazing and hugely useful and, crucially, nobody ever talks about it - just like Inbox. Perfectly positioned to be killed.

The tie in to assistant, used as a shopping list, was already axed for some garbage online-only thing that can't even reorder items.

I say the same about startups. I resent that they don't keep pouring their time, money, and passion into efforts that lack product/market fit. As long as I'm not paying for it, I vote that they continue investing.

I'm a happy and heavy user of Inbox, this came as a shock to me. I guess I'll wait and see by January how is Gmail, but I'm not looking forward.

> By retiring Inbox, is Google losing a valuable ability to experiment with new email functionality in a way that’s tough to do with a billion-user mainstay?

I also agree with this. If Google decided to let Inbox go, same way as with Wave, then the next "email UX experiment" will be another codename. Why not use the existing Inbox product to do the next innovation? Its base is formed by users which already showed adoption to new ideas and UI.

> Why not use the existing Inbox product to do the next innovation?

Because the next innovation may be a completely different direction. I much prefer Inbox to Gmail, but I'd be a lot less happy for the Inbox name to be kept but the actual app to replaced by some completely new vision.

> Its base is formed by users which already showed adoption to new ideas and UI.

I bought into Inbox’s specific vision, not the generic idea of novelty. If Inbox didn't work out for Google, I'm disappointed, but I'd rather they kill it openly than that I get force fed some new unrelated novelty approach because I was using Inbox and must therefore be into whatever.

I really hated Inbox. I thought it was one of the worst ideas they had come up with in years. But, after seeing the amount of support that it has in this thread, I'm sad it's going just for the thing you mentioned. They could have kept this as an experimental ground to give the rest of the users good features that weren't so disruptive to what we are used to.

I can see this being seen as a turning point in the future, if Google loses influence.

Until now, every time people were saying "I won't use a new google product, I don't trust them to keep it running", they were quickly blamed by googlers who replied this team had nothing to do with that team, and that you could not blame google forever for having close greader on you. And it was reasonable to think greader was an accident and we could not hold grudge on everything from google because of it (not that google did not close other products, but they were not as popular and difficult to replace).

But now, it's not an exception anymore, and it comes in a time when firefox is gathering new strength, when duckduckgo results are getting competitively good, when purism is working on a true linux phone... Google has been so strong this start of century not only because they had outstanding products, but also because they had a loyal and passionate hardcore users base. I can't see them not losing that, in the future (time will tell, obviously).

I think this choice may be partially inspired by the fact that lots of people never switched to Inbox and people like myself actually switched back at some point. For me pinning UX kind of sucked and I really missed the Gmail density of information.

What's sad is that Inbox stopped evolving almost immediately after they released it. This seems to be a thing at Google. Release something, hype it, and then just walk away instead of maintaining and improving it. If there was anyone working on that at all in the last 3 years; sorry I failed to notice that there was anything happening at all. It looks to me that there was a skeleton maintenance team at best. So, it looks like there was some infighting and the Inbox team got starved of resources. Gmail on the other hand was improved a lot over the past few years.

In general it strikes me that essentially all attempts by Google to do a bait and switch of their products in the past few years have been impopular and somewhat underwhelming in their outcome. They've killed a lot of popular products in favor of things that then flopped. They've repeatedly walked away from products that maybe had issues but were entirely fixable only to replace them with something worse.

There's something deeply wrong with how Google is being managed since Alphabet was created. They are lacking a clear direction/strategy. Is it Fuchsia, Chrome OS or Android that is going to be the OS of choice? I'm not sure they know the answer themselves. I'm not sure their OEMs know either. My advice, kill two out of three and get it done within the next 12 months. IMHO, Android would at this point be by far the most disruptive thing to kill. There's a big risk of forks surviving any attempt by Google to kill that and ending up being a headache for Google.

Similarly, which of their billion chat clients are we supposed to actually use at this point? Same advice, pick one, kill the rest ASAP. IMHO keeping and fixing hangouts is the best course of action at this point. It's the only one that's been around long enough to actually have a user base (despite it's many flaws and terrible UX).

I was actually never able to switch. I did receive my invitation email, but the link never did work. I requested another one and the link never did work. Wait 6 months rinse repeat. My accounts are broken at google or something. That would explain the notifications I get for other users....

if there was infighting atleast we(the users) would hear about it. google just seems to encourage people to move past the things they've made instead of innovating on it so we(as users) never hear anything until a project is killed off.

I've been in big companies, this has infighting written all over it. Two competing teams, one gets shut down. Classic stuff. Usually means two separate business units with competing middle management fighting over resources. One of them won. My guess is this happened quite some time ago and most of the team was reassigned years ago already.

I'm actually thinking of switching to a different email service because of this. Gmail is just way to cluttered for my taste, inbox's model where you can just check off emails and they're gone was such a time-saver and a fresh breath of air.

I hope I can find something as simplistic and at the same time feature rich somewhere else :(

I've wanted to for a long time;Inbox put that on hold because it made my email manageable again. Clearly it's time to start looking for alternatives again.

What alternatives are there, similar to Inbox?

I wish I knew of any, but after having tried Gmail again after this announcement, I really don't want to go back. If I can't find any I might be forced to write my own.

Google's penchant for killing products is why I moved away from them for even their stable products. I want a company to be okay with having a stable platform of boring work to build exciting things on top of and Google isn't that company. Add to that my lack of trust in Google to not spy even when it says it won't, and it was just a perfect series of events. I honestly think the phone jack removal might have been the defining moment when I decided to move to an iPhone 6S. They will pry that phone jack from my cold dead hands.

That's the problem with Google latest-and-greatest offerings - they roll it out, make a hype, if you're naive enough you start using it, integrate it in your workflow - and they they decide it's not what they wanted and throw it out, and you have to re-do your workflow again.

I just switched to using desktop mail client and going to web UI only occasionally - at least desktop client is not likely to go away when Google gets bored with it.

I don't like Inbox. So, rather than being annoyed it's going, I'm worried that Google will morph GMail into Inbox and force me to use its non-chronological features. I've already had it shoved down my throat with the web app - thankfully I could revert it.

WTF

I use inbox for everything. GMail is basically unusable for me at this point. This is a complete disaster.

Been using Inbox for the last 4 years, sad to see it go. The bundle structure, and snoozing are both features I use religiously.

Thanks to the Inbox team for delivering a great product!

Very disappointing. I feel like this is retrograde -- my impression is that Gmail is a very advanced tool for people who care (by choice or professional obligation) about their email, whereas Inbox was a huge leap forwards for people who just want to avoid wasting time on email. And I kind of thought the latter was more forward-looking.

Well thanks Google. You just made the necessary transition into MS Outlook land so much more easy.

My company got bought and I need to switch into MS land. Sadly. But my biggest complain was to loose my workflow from Inbox. Google killing this just kills one argument from my list. Sadly.

I like the UI. I really, really like the reminders and the bundles. And the ability to postpone a message to see it as new some later time was a big boon too.

I know - lot's of that is already in Gmail. But the UI is just so... not there. Well. Again - Google killing a great product that only a minority of people are using. It is not that nerds matter.

Same here without the aquisition. Will be interesting to see how much Inbox functionality can be replicated by custom rules etc.

Does Gmail have any features like Inbox's groupings for Trips?

I have a lot of emails grouped together into a Trip, which Inbox helpfully shows a card summary for (including flights and reservations).

Trips is by far my most used feature -- I'm really going to miss that too!

Damnit, I love inbox and I use it everyday. Much preferred to the GMAIL ui, seemed less cluttered to me and the swiping features to archive/snooze/pin were great. Yikes. It worked really well out of the box for bundling and didn't need much configuration. RIP inbox.

Okay, what can I download for iPhone to replace this? It was truly a beautiful UX. I loved it every single day I used it.

Gmail? Most of the feature are there already.

Inbox was the first tool that helped me reach "inbox zero". I really liked the feel of seeing the cute landscape after I was done with my email. Anyways I saw this coming since they took a lot of time to update their app for the iPhone X.

I don't know why this surprises me but this just feels weird.

I felt like Inbox was the product that I was supposed to get on board with. It really is true that you just can't love google products. They make it freaking impossible.

What a cruel joke! That was a really great product.

I've completely given up hope of anything I love in technology lasting unless it's a paid product from a company that doesn't rely on advertising for revenue. Even then it's not perfect, but fuck if this isn't CLASSIC GOOGLE BULLSHIT.

Sometimes it's killing a perfectly good product (ala Reader) after getting everyone to emotionally invest in it, and then there's the equally frustrating aquihire. Sell the lie that the beloved product will continue and that the team is so excited for the Incredible Journey[1] ahead and then bam, bullet to the head. Product killed.

I still have scars from Reader, Sparrow, and Songza. And Mailbox! Looks like I switched to Fastmail just in time to avoid another heartbreak. Not too fancy but reliable AF and not going anywhere. Money well spent.

Between this and Apple's post-Steve product decisions I'm becoming a curmudgeon in this current world of technology, wishing we could turn the clock back the clock nine years to when things made more sense.

But honestly, in my fantasy world you know what I'd love to see? Some sort of statement that went along with an app detailing what their future plan is for cashing out or shutting down. Like, "If we don't survive as a business we will open source our product and provide an avenue for you to continue using it". Or, "We're building a sustainable lifestyle business and are not interested in being swallowed up by Google and being shut down" Or "We're looking to cash the fuck out ASAP! No guarantees; enjoy the ride!"

I have fun dreams.

[1] https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

WTF. I have been using and loving (for the most part) Inbox since they launched it. I had to work so hard to bring down my Inbox to zero. sigh I guess with Google, I should have expected as much.

I don't understand Google here. Clearly Gmail is not the final word about email user interface, and Inbox was a very promising first step. I can understand, if Inbox did not receive enough attention, to start moving Inbox to different directions, but how is it possible that Google has no space for a permanent alternative UI testing project?

This may be a case of following the data with disregard to the dynamics.

1. In the beginning there was G Mail and there where two camps(roughly):

  a. Those who made heavy use of e-mail, and where "adapted" to the user interface.

  b. Those who had problems with the UI(replying to all their emails, etc...)

Of those two camps: those in camp `a` where unlikely to switch. That would have interfered with their workflow.

Those in camp `b`, not all switched because people resist change. Change takes energy.

2. Then there was `Inbox`

Now, there is a subset of camp `b` which has adapted its workflow to use Inbox. The most satisfied ones are here complaining :).

They don't want to go back to G mail, but will be forced to.

The questions I would ask, if I were responsible for shutting down Inbox, are:

* How many people were leaving inbox for G mail? * Why?

Also gmail is the default android app but I'd guess they have consider that.

What's the point of adopting Google products if most end up being canned? I love that they're willing to release cool new products but it's almost like a bunch of children who quickly move on to another set of toys

That makes me sad. I love the snooze features of inbox. The new gmail one is not the same. :(. Especially the UX of the iPhone app.

Oh well.

You have it in Gmail now too.

It’s not the same on the UX I’m missing. In the inbox app it’s a quick swipe to snooze. In Gmail it archives. :(

Sad to see this here, but if anyone is interested in a new tool with some of the features of Inbox (snoozing, pinning and more to come), we're building Monolist (https://monolist.co).

Monolist integrates directly into the tools you use and surfaces things that you can act on inline in the app (missed Slack mentions, Asana tasks, Calendar invites etc.). We're actually working on a GMail integration right now and would love to hear from the community what kinds of Inbox features we could replicate successfully.

My biggest thing that I am kind of panicking that I'm going to lose is the ability to batch groups of emails into bundles and deliver them at given times of the day.

For example, all "purchase" emails (emails like shipping updates, receipts, etc...) are automatically hidden whenever they come in, and are delivered under one bundle at 9am for me, and they will send notifications to my devices and show up right in front of me at that time.

This is very different than something like Gmail tabs, because they are fully out of sight and out of mind until they "arrive" that morning.

And that feature is the killer feature for me. Imagine if your physical mail was delivered to your door tens or hundreds of times a day? That's how I feel about normal email clients.

And after getting used to this way of working, I have this vacuum that I desperately want filled with just not email, but all notifications on all platforms.

Id love to queue up all Reddit messages until after my workday, bundle most Twitter notifications until one specific time every day, get a notification from slack at 4:45 and "snooze" it to show up like new tomorrow morning at 9 AM.

Snoozing notifications individually isn't a replacement, the ability to choose to snooze automatically to the next key time was huge. Putting them in tabs hidden from the "main" view isn't a replacement, I won't remember to check that tab unless I'm in my email and have time to do it (and remember to).

Inbox changed how I deal with interruptions, it changed what I want from a phone, it helped me stop my FOMO in a lot of areas, and kept me from forgetting to answer emails and do tasks because I would forget to check a task list or something.

I know I'm only one person, and I still haven't clicked on your pink and checked it out (I plan to right after this), but I would very much pay good money for software that can enable this workflow again, especially if it works for more than just emails and reminders.

As a heavy Inbox user this is definitely a bummer, but I do feel a bit relieved to know what is coming to Gmail.

Last month a video showing some future updates to the Material Design components leaked. If you check out https://youtu.be/0mAude0774I?t=1m27s you can (briefly) see that the version of Gmail they're showing has a lot of functionality seen in Inbox, particularly Trip cards and expandable message bodies. Fingers crossed!

I still deeply miss Mailbox (the cross platform app bought and abandoned by Dropbox). It was SO fast and sleek. Emails appeared damn near instantly, the app never lagged, and actions taken locally were reflected remotely near instantaneously.

Email clients are a lot better now than then. In fact the best features of Mailbox (swipe to /action/ and snoozing) has been copied by basically every email client now. However, I have yet to find an email app for either macOS or iOS that's as consistently fast.

Pinning, bundling, gestures and embedded todos/reminders all make Inbox the best email app there is. Hats off to the Inbox team - you've made a great product. I'll miss it.

Hmm this really sucks, especially for my daily/hourly reminders that I have set up. What are others using to replace Inbox's reminders?

Inbox has got to be the single most useful productivity tool for me. Pinning, bundling, and snoozing just make managing emails so quick and efficient since you can easily triage and get rid of what doesn't matter, and Gmail as it currently stands just can't compete.

If bundling and pinning aren't brought over to Gmail like snooze, Gmail is basically dead to me from an efficiency perspective since manually selecting what you want to remove takes significantly longer than pinning and sweeping in Inbox.

Worse still, there's the opposite problem if we wanted to build an Inbox successor on top of Gmail since while bundling and pinning would be easily implemented by the client, snooze is still not part of the Gmail API[1] so there would need to be a completely separate layer of snoozing in the client.

Honestly, if a competitor were to rise and implement Inbox's feature set, my money is on the table.

[1] https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/109952618

You've got to be kidding me. This was the last thing I used heavily. I'm out the door now. Good grief does this company frustrate me.

I tried to move to Inbox but kept having to use the Gmail app after I would see alerts for mail and then was unable to find the message in question in Inbox without searching, which is tedious. The "missed messages" problem was one I couldn't ever get past (maybe my own settings were to blame -- but at the end of the day it wasn't worth the time to figure out).

When Google shutdown their RSS Reader, Feedly lived...

What’s the Inbox successor going to be?

OK, how do I get Inbox's "sweep" action in Gmail?

What "sweep" did is just in one click get rid of _everything_ that you haven't pinned. It was a massive productivity boost for someone for whom dealing with email was mostly a waste of time (my company doesn't really use email much, so my inbox mostly contained notifications from other apps).

Ugh! I love Inbox, going back to the Gmail interface feels awful in comparison. I love the grouping of emails by day so I can easily see everything that came in today.

Having a separate app that takes a different approach which heavy users of email might like makes sense - the UI you need when you are getting 100+ emails a day is very different from when you are getting 5.

Side-note on Google's communication systems, I watch an email thread at work where it went:

    1) Here are my questions
    2) I've added responses below in BLUE
    3) Additional feedback in GREEN
    4) More responses in BROWN

and it really made me miss Google Wave. Inline replies within long emails are not well handled.

Is that similar to the functionality provided by Twist from Doist? It's not email based but it seems to be a hybrid of Email and Slack. I've only messed with it a few times and never with Google Wave, but it sounds similar to what you're describing.

I'm not familiar with Twist but from a quick glance I don't see a similar function.

Wave let you post a reply in the middle of someone else's message, so that if you were presented with a whole list of questions you could answer each of them inline, and other people could tag on to those new conversation threads in place.

I'm another one of the disappointed long time users. Just tried Gmail again and the UI/UX is not yet there, the ads in the app is also a big downgrade...

I also loved to use "save to inbox" feature (creating reminders from outside). It is a share option on android so accessible from pretty much anywhere and on PC I used the Inbox extension on chrome that has the same feature to save the current page.

Now for the future... I'm probably dreaming but I wish the snooze/done paradigm would be provided by a stand-alone service and available system wide and in the cloud (with an open API). We should be able to "snooze" anything (a watsapp message, a sms, a web page) and select a date/location/device that will wake it again. Bundling could also be provided by the same service...

Edit: that service should of course also replace the several tasks/reminders services and apps that google has created these last years.

Google says tasks is the replacement for the "snooze" feature but going to see deleted tasks is like i'm visiting the wayback machine -> https://mail.google.com/tasks/canvas genuinely made me go wtf

Inbox loads instantly and continues loading, GMail takes up to 10 Seconds in Firefox on a pretty decent machine...

I'm sure I'm repeating voices here, but I'm really sad. And the article also mentions Mailbox too which I used before and moved to Inbox because it had a similar interface/structure. I love grouped archive/delete, I love pins, I love snooze. Inbox, I feel, is the only sane way to do email.

I don't know whether I want to even adopt a new product again, from anyone, and integrate it into my workflow. I've had Astrid (to Yahoo(?)), Sunshine Calendar (to Microsoft), Mailbox (to DropBox) gone and now it's Inbox.

Maybe it is time to vote (and ask devs/companies to enable us to) with our wallets. I have Todoist and trying out Notion, I really hope they don't roll over soon.

Now I kinda understand people who want to roll their own tools for everything.. You don't become dependent on others for what is important to you.

What is with this trend of "discontinuing" products that are already receiving little to no maintenance? Google is not the only one guilty of this.

From the announcement, I get the idea that if I use Inbox today, it will be gone and I will no longer be able to use it after the EOL date is passed. Is it really that hard to keep the lights on, for a product for which development has already been finished?

People like this product and it has features that no others do. I don't want to go back to using the Gmail app on my Android either. There are tens of thousands of unmaintained Android apps from developers who may have even died, or at least we may never hear from again. So why should this one need to be formally sunsetted?

I am far more likely to quit email altogether, than to embrace a vanilla Gmail experience at this point.

I'm struggling to post a comment that doesn't just consist of a lot of swearv words strung together.

I knew this might happen but I'm really gutted. I'm actually worried about how my time management and workflow is going to fare in light of this.

It's weird how much this bothers me.

I was already a 'power' Gmail user when Inbox was released. I had developed muscle-memory for prob 20 keyboard shortcuts and used Gmail mouse-free, had dozens of labels, used a slew of Gmail Labs, and had given up using an external email client (used Gmail in a browser exclusively).

Yet when Inbox came along, it was incredibly useful, especially on my phone. It was my choice of app for quickly digesting email on-the-go. I stopped using the Gmail app.

But conversely on the desktop, I remained a Gmail user and never used Inbox.

I understand that the rumors are that Bundles are coming to Gmail which is good and necessary. I can only hope that it's as seamless in the mobile app as it is now in Inbox.

Long live Inbox!

>"...as then senior VP Sundar Pichai explained in a blog post, Inbox was “designed to focus on what really matters.”"

So does "what really" mattered then no longer matter now? Certainly email hasn't fundamentally changed since then.

I gave up on using Inbox a few months ago as I started to find it too slow, and absolutely _loved_ the refreshed Gmail and Calendar interfaces.

However, I really hope that they fold the Reminders functionality from Keep into Gmail now, as the reminders integration across Inbox/Keep/Cal was one of my main reasons for sticking with it for as long as I did. That new Tasks interface is pretty, and I get what it's doing by trying to be a bit more like Todoist, but I think bringing full-on Reminders to Gmail as 'first class citizens' would make a lot of people miss Inbox much less, and probably get me to drop Todoist.

I would have ended up using it if I hadn't left GMail for good now. All the privacy revelations and planet-scale data mining of private data of the past years has led me to the conclusion it's better to self-host in the long-term. (Ads based on my E-Mail conversations, Snowden, ...) At the moment I have a patch work solution based on different providers but at some point it'll all be on my own servers.

I kind of miss the crazy new features but the other stuff is developing at a faster pace then ever and gets unexpected features. Inbox is pretty cool, I can even use it when I'm completely drunk ;)

If you're looking for an alternative to Google Inbox, you should give SaneBox a try. You can train it so only the emails you want to see end up in your inbox. Here's a $25 off code: www.sanebox.com/inbox

I really like Inbox reminders and the smart addressee option when pressing the "Compose" button. I use reminders when I'm offline to save notes to myself. If I use my Google Home, then the reminders also show up in Inbox. I really liked how reminders and this part of the Google ecosystem integrated with my lifestyle routines. I guess I could switch to Todoist or roll my own thing, but it won't be the same.

Needless to say I'm miffed by this news. It tells me it's dangerous to love Google products no matter how great they are, because one day they'll be taken away.

I saw this coming when it took Google months to update the Inbox app for the iPhoneX. The regular gmail app was updated almost instantly. I started weaning myself off of Inbox then, even though it finally was updated.

I think framing the conversation as a deprecation or discontinuation of a product is too generous towards Google. It makes it seem like the product has reached it's end of life.

This isn't a discontinuation, it's a failure. If invoice was a startup this would be an "our incredible journey" article after the company has been acquired and it's product destroyed.

Google has failed to monetize inbox.

Similarly it's not that we don't use google products because we fear they'll discontinue it, google has failed too many times - you don't bet on a company that fails so often.

I hate that they did this to Inbox, after they did something similar to Wave. But, I think this is how they operate. Their strategy seems to be to build a product, launch it, see if it reaches some hidden very high threshold of use, if it doesn't then discontinue it, and then either shelve it or open source it. I can't fault them for that strategy, even though I don't like the results, because I think that may be how they have to operate at their scale. I do wish they would have a policy of always open sourcing a product that they kill.

I've always used a particular email flow in Apple's Mail.app that allows me to use my email exactly as an Inbox user here calls it: "reminders as a first class citizen of your inbox". Is that what Inbox was for?

If so, am I the only one that uses Mail.app (or whatever email client) like this? :

https://jor.is/mail-flow.jpg

In short: Sort by flags, then by date received. Keeps your actionables on top, even grouped by (flag color) category if you want. I never forget to deal with any of my emails.

I still use Inbox and I love it. I snooze reminders all the time for bills and regular maintenance tasks. If I snoozed something for a few years from now, does anyone know if it'll work in gmail?

There's been some revisionist history out there, but Inbox was intended to be "the next version of Gmail" at the time, until a near revolt internally about how the Gmail team "ruined Gmail" led them to launch it as a "separate product" instead.

Now that there's a new new version of Gmail, which was rolled out a couple of months ago that hasn't upset everyone, it's unsurprising the unloved stepchild of the family is going away.

Old Gmail was version 1, Inbox was version 2, and the new Gmail is version 3.

FFS! I finally managed to get into using Inbox, and Google is being google again and killing the project.

I guess there’s something to the adage that you shouldn’t use anything google if you want it to last.

They merged the most useful features from inbox into the new gmail (1), and (imho) that's a really good move. I'm really happy with gmai (and never was a "true" inbox user though).

1: https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/stay-composed-heres-q...

Inbox so far is the very best email client I used. It is not an email client, rather a task manager. Mails, reminders, auto reminder, auto-grouping, oh, and TRIPS!

Oh man, trips, every incoming email related to a trip is automatically merged into the bundle, airline tickets, car rentals, hotels, flight schedule changes, you simply need nothing else, it was all there.

The new Gmail recently introduced is not getting close to Inbox.

I can't believe they do it.

Friends don't let friends depend on Google products.

Friends don't let friends depend on web apps.

This kills me. I loved the reminders mixed with emails, I didn't need any separate app: all notes abd emails abd reminders in a single giant todo interface. It's perfect. The migration guide states they have nothing for the reminders beside a stupid suggestion to use split screen with 2 apps on phone (which is not even close to what i need).

I'm looking around for alternative products that behave like inbox.

Inbox had two distinct content types, emails and reminders. Both where handled the same by Inbox but reminders don't show up in Gmail. Anyone found yet how to migrate these to Gmail? I have a lot of reminders that are snoozed at specific times and also to "Some day". Would really hate to loose them. I checked to data exporter Google provides and it has no entry for Inbox, only Gmail.

They are in your Google Calendar I think

I really don't get the problem here. Google's intentions for Inbox were always clear in that it was an experiment to see where mail could be headed and where they could try things that may find their way into Gmail. That's what they have done. Lots of features are now in Gmail. Now Inbox is being put to rest with about half a year of a retirement announcement in advance.

Is there any good todo manager with reminders and saved link with a snooze function like Inbox? or is there any way to see those in Gmail?

If someone makes a clone that I can plug my @gmail.com account into, or just forward from, I will be a paying customer.

This isn't huge news IMO. Lots of the UI changes have appeared in Gmail already and unless they were going to keep changing Inbox it no longer has a raison d'être.

And while I know some people aren't a fan of Google shuttering products, I appreciate that they let you 'test' the bleeding edge if you want.

I suggest you voice your opinion here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm...

Took me the better part of an hour to find snooze in the Android Gmail app. It wouldn't appear until after I visited gmail.com in a full browser. That is a royal clustermess. I'm usually not annoyed by vendors changing their stuff. Super annoying to have to give up the blue app.

I'm switching to protonmail because of this. It has a nice UI and as a bonus I'll get encryption.

I can't keep the various gmail clients straight, so I'm not too broken up. AFAICT:

* I use Inbox most of the time, until... * I need to create a filter, and I switch to gmail to do it. * Then I continue using gmail because I forget to change back to Inbox...

Well, I suppose I'll be looking for a replacement to Gmail pretty quick. Long time inbox user from the beginning, and Gmail still isn't caught up to it in UI/UX, plus loads of my "Done" emails in inbox still show up in Gmail.

Inbox wasn't a web app. That's why never used it. You had to install the app onto your phone. Since I'm a light user of email this didn't make sense. From reading the comments I can see why people loved it as a full app though.

I'd like to see the new Gmail interface abandoned. It soaks my CPU doing all these b.s. animations that don't actually advance the UI or the UX. And times millions of users, what's the carbon footprint of all those extra CPU cycles?

This was the last thing keeping me in the Google Ecosystem, shattered that they're killing it.

I heavily used the trips mail bundling with "Google Trips" integration for both personal business trips.

I think it's finally time to port my mail to another carrier

I like the search capability of inbox - it always was better than gmail.

It had it quirks due to "designed to focus on what really matters." - actually meaning: "we'll ignore what you want and need and do it the way we think you need".

Smart move. The UI wasn't that great, the product wasn't intuitive, and why would you have two inbox clients from one company? Normal people don't use Inbox, they just want to use regular Gmail and not think about it.

That's unfortunate. I really liked Inbox (other than the horrible performance)

Google's communication strategy (and any other strategy really) is just a reflection of internal incentives structure and organization structure. One would hope that this is the other way around, but it is what it is.

Time to start an open source version of Inbox? -> https://codepen.io/simoberny/pen/bdvMyj

Is there any Win/macos desktop app that works somewhat similar to Inbox?

Man, I just tried out gmail and the UI is so bloated and slow. C'mon google, don't bullshit us that "gmail" is equivalent. It's not about what it can do, it's how it does it.

This really bums me out. I’ve been using inbox all-in since the start and have loved it since day one. Switching back to gmail is going to be a real challenge as I prefer the way it organizes my email.

Maybe the term for this is "unfluencing" - where you take a product used by many influencers and drop it, making them mad and hostile and reducing trust.

It's the opposite to "influencing".

Correct me if I'm wrong but was the purpose of Inbox to test and experiment new features/functionality to be added to Gmail? It did not seem this was meant to be a long term solution.

Yikes. I loved Inbox and was using it until a couple months ago. I moved to FastMail because I wanted to host my email with another provider. I certainly won't be going back to Google now.

I'm really going to miss the remainders feature from inbox. Tried the task app for gmail and it doesn't even allow setting a time, just date.

It also doesn't have anything like pinning links.

To be honest; I'm a little surprised it's lasted this long.

Come on, you knew this was coming the day they launched it, right? They were not going to maintain both gmail and Inbox, and Inbox just could not win.

But it looks like gmail is getting Inbox features.

I assumed this was coming eventually. It's been clear for a while that Gmail is under active development and Inbox isn't, so I figured Inbox's days had to be numbered.

Hey guys, majority of people here are smart - why, why, why do you use any of Google products? Just learn to live without them and you will be much happier. Google is crap.

To all inbox user I will appreciate your opinion on Centask which attempts to take inbox philosophy one step forward and completely merge Gmail inbox and task management

Feels like Google Reader 2.0 for me .... Fool me twice...

Damn. Only yesterday I said to a friend that Inbox is miles above other stuff I used. Bah Google. At least Open Source it then so we can take over :(

I can never relate to people's love of this product. To me, it added noise and complexity to an otherwise simple email system. I aggressively tag, archive, and delete mail. I process and/or backlog messages in conjunction with calendar to always keep my inbox to <10 messages.

The cognitive overhead to maintain this discipline has and will forever be ~0.

Inbox is pure cruft over native Gmail. That's an offensive opinion to many, I know, but the intrinsic value inbox brings is very low over other highly accessible tooling already available within a few clicks.

If you had to do with tons of email Inbox seem like it would be great. However it just got in the way when you only had to deal a few emails a day.

I went from 10000+ unread emails to inbox-zero. I honestly don’t think I could have taken the leap without Inbox. True, I don’t need the bundling feature as much any more, but I’m sad the product is going away.

Exactly that. I really digged the different philosophy Inbox brought to the table. You had "Inbox Zero" by creating a Task List out of your inbox. It was practically a todo list made up of emails. With scheduling, reminders, pinning and stuff. And automatically sorting into bundles like social, purchases or trips. Man I will miss the automatic bundling of all my trip related mails.

YES. it doesn't matter if you CAN possibly recreate some of the functionality in gmail. it matters if the app guides you to your preferred workflow. Inbox made it easier to keep inbox zero than not. Thats the difference.

I'm a little confused by the replies here. From the source article from Google [0], it sounds like they are planning on merging Inbox features back into Gmail and focusing on one product instead of two. They even put out a transition guide. I think long term this is a good thing. Why are people freaking out?

0: https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/inbox-signing-find-yo...

For anyone wondering how to see your Inbox "pins" in Gmail, search for "label:pinned" (it's a secret label!)

This is devastating news. I'm going to completely change my workflow around email. Does anybody know of a comparable product?

Ugh. I while back I switched all my gcal events which emailed me to reminders. Now I have to change them all back again.

Why isn't Google more clear on the life expectancy of its products? Because it would hurt adoption numbers.

So... anyone know of an open source mail client that is designed around the same philosophy as inbox?

Brutal. Hope someone builds an Inbox replacement before next March. Gmail feels archaic after Inbox.

Google breaks my heart yet again. Farewell, Inbox!

I guess next they'll discontinue my phone service, too.

Is anyone interested in building a new email client/service based on the inbox-as-a-todo-list paradigm?

Maybe something that would work with any email provider but would sync todo/done/snoozed state with our server. Or perhaps could embed that state in IMAP flags.

I'd be open to working on the backend and arch if there's interest.

Don't worry people, remember Google latitude? It was gone and came back :)

Thunderbird is still around and I'm sticking with it as long as it works.

Gmail search is terrible... it’s the one thing I don’t get why it’s so bad.

Ok, this was the last thing that will push me off of Google services. I was already reluctant to use their new apps and services and was pondering moving anyway. Anyhow only thing that does not have proper replacement is Photos but I will manage.

Hmm, maybe we should create an open source version of inbox?

Meanwhile Gmail search is still not working properly...

inbox made gmail slower, used more memory to display the same content, just give me alpine in a browser with decent search

Anyone know why they're shuttering it?

i don't know either, but let me guess... money?

power users here are arguing UI and functionality... but when they redesigned GMail, i took a look. and it dawn upon me that with Inbox i was in a different world. Inbox has 0 ads. GMail is full of ads. to the point i don't even know where my messages are. they be scrapping your messages like crazy to get you to click on those ads.

i don't blame Google. really. it's just sad to have to switch yet again.

Typical Google

Good news everyone: Google will be integrating their Trips feature into Trio (the successor to Duo after it sunsets next month).

Superhuman is a great alternative.

Please don't shutdown Inbox!

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Google: redefining reliable

This is pretty frustrating.

No!!!!!!!!!!!!!

didgoogleshutdown.com needs an update

Clearly evil

They can pry it from my cold dead hands

Good riddance

Aw fuck.

good riddance

OOPS

Noooooo. I love bundling and the Gmail UI is just so cluttered with stuff.

EDIT: Okay, they are porting bundling to Gmail. I hope they also clean up the UI. The settings dialog is a nightmare to look at.

Finally, they are following through with their own app store policy of banning apps with “repetitive content”[1].

1. https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy-print...

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