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Comment by bkandel | Hacker News Reader

I usually think these "Google is the worst" posts are over the top, but I genuinely find Gmail's mobile interface bewildering. There are two three-dot/ellipsis icons when you read an email and after using mobile Gmail for years I have no idea which actions are in which. "Move to Inbox": upper icon. "Add star": lower icon. "Mark important": upper icon. "Mark unread": lower icon. I'm sure there's some explanation or at least mnemonic but I'm lost.

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That's just a reflection of the data model, which is internally consistent but probably doesn't exist in the minds of all users.

The reason "move to [label]" is at the top of the screen is because that action affects the whole thread, not one message in the thread.

Star is attached to a message or a thread, so that should be in both menus, but in practice the mobile (iOS) app only lets you star a thread from the threadlist, while desktop web lets you star a thread while reading it. This is inconsistent.

Important is again in the thread's menu because it's an attribute of threads, not messages.

Read-ness is again an aspect of messages, not threads.

One of many reasons I’ve stuck with the default “Mail” app on iOS. Labeling, attachments, search, etc. all work fine. I manage my filters (an infrequent task) through the desktop web interface. The Mail app UI hasn’t changed much in the last ten years.

If Google ever breaks plain old IMAP support, I’ll complete my migration to Fastmail.

There's three if you count Chrome's one

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