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Comment by nathancahill | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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..

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.

>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.

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

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