One reason Gmail for iOS still sucks | Hacker News Reader

One reason Gmail for iOS still sucks

iamnotaprogrammer.com

185 pointssudonim81 comments

Open articleView on HN

Google, I have the solution.

Step 1: Checkout the Sparrow source code

Step 2: Find and Replace All on the word "Sparrow" and change it to "Gmail"

Step 3: Add push notifications.

Compile and send to the app store.

I dunno about that - I really wanted to like Sparrow for iOS (aside from a couple bugs dealing with insane volumes of email, I love it on the desktop) but it never felt quite right to me.

I've actually just now reinstalled it to check what bothered me so much, and it's the same issue I have with the new Gmail app: swipe-to-archive simply isn't there. Frequency of me archiving messages: extremely high. Frequency of changing between different folders: nearly zero. Yet the left-to-right swipe which gives you the "delete" button in Mail brings that weird Facebook-esque hierarchical navbar that's become so prevalent in the last couple years.

Swiping the other direction exposes five options, two of which (I assume "archive" and "delete") have rather ambiguous icons. Mental energy - do not like (see also: new Gmail web UI).

When viewing an individual message, it's two taps to do all of the stuff that takes one in Mail. The designers traded always-visible icons for extra message real estate; clearly a matter of personal preference, but the wrong one for me.

Just goes to show how oddly personal the email experience can be, especially when you consider everyone's various workflows.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by 'swiping the other direction', but when I swipe from right to left on a message it displays an 'Archive' button over the message.

>> swipe-to-archive simply isn't there

>> Swiping the other direction exposes five options, two of which (I assume "archive" and "delete") have rather ambiguous icons

Hyperbole, much?

No. Swipe-to-archive means working the same way as it works in every single other iOS app that implements that functionality: left-to-right.

edit - To clarify: widely-adopted shortcuts are only effective when they work the same everywhere. Imagine if some applications mapped "paste" to ^P instead of ^V. It might as well not be there.

Why didn't Sparrow have Push again? Seems like a no brainer, but I vaguely remember them being caught in a pickle that prevented it.

IIRC because they didn't want to store your username/passwords on the cloud on their servers. The password you gave them was only used on the device, and to have push notification they had to have a server pinging Google every few second and if there was a new mail, send a notification to the device. Needless to say, it's a costly business when you have a few million users.

They wanted Apple to allow then to run a daemon process that checks for new mail on the device, which Apple was reluctant to do (in general, I really like Apple's implementation of background services, but in this case I think they should've relented).

I love the Gmail iPhone app.

In particular, I love that it lets me change the "from" address, similarly to how the gmail.com site lets me do that.

Neither Mail.app nor Sparrow made it easy to change the from.

I have a few different email addresses that all get forwarded to my gmail account. Finally my mobile mail problem -- being able to select my from -- is solved.

If anyone from Google is reading this, thank you!

In Mail.app on iOS you just have to tap the 'From' address and choose a different one. What am I missing?

Not exactly.

To send from a different 'From' in Mail.app, first you need to connect your iPhone to additional email accounts (Settings->Mail). Then these addresses will show up in your 'From' drop down.

But then you end up with multiple inboxes in your Mail.app. Which is messy, fills up storage, and hurts my brain -- since I never need to check my other inboxes (because all my email addresses forward to the same Gmail account).

With the Gmail iPhone app, I just need to prove once (in gmail.com) that I have access to whatever 'From' addresss I want. Then I can select them in the Gmail app.

Note: I admit that the viewport issues discussed in the blog post are indeed an annoyance that I hope Google fixes soon. But I prefer Gmail app to Mail.app nonetheless.

To send from different mail addresses in Mail.app for iOS with only one inbox, you can add your additional mail addresses to your default mail address in the mail configuration by separating them with commas:

default@example.com, additional1@example.com, additional2@example.com, etc.

The same trick works for the OS X version of Mail.app

Thanks! I upvoted you because this was really good news for me.

On the iPhone (but not the iPad) I think you have to write this somewhere else and paste it in because I can't find a comma on the keyboard when editing that text field!

You are right, I have never actually entered my additional mail addresses into that text field but prepared the string in a text editor and copied it afterwards.

Unfortunately this does not work for accounts of the type "GMail", as far as I can see. (Maybe you could configure your gmail account as an IMAP account, but then you lose a few gmail-specific features)

That is correct; if I use the 'Google Mail' setup and add an additional mail address, the IMAP login no longer works since the mail addresses as a whole are taken as username. In the default IMAP setup, sender mail addresses and the user name are separated.

Are there any other Gmail-specific features except for 'Archive'?

My main annoyance with Gmail and local mail clients – including Mail.app for iOS and OS X – is that those clients show mails at least twice due to Gmail's label structure if you enable all labels. I am therefore glad that the new Gmail app for iOS is much more usable. On the Mac, I use Mailplane and Mail.app only for backup and offline usage purposes.

It seems like "GMAIL"-account types have real push? Or at least I'm seemingly getting new mail much quicker than I ever used to get on IMAP?

Plus it integrates much more smoothly into the calendar app as well. Better than fiddling around with webcal links and the very well hidden multi-calendar selector at https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect )

Never had a problem with duplicate mails, in fact I'm having a problem with de-duplicated mails (When I send a mail to a mailinglist, I never receive a copy back that ensures proper list delivery, because it gets de-duplicated to the copy in Sent mail)

Nice little tip. Thanks

Unfortunately this only works for multiple addresses with the same SMTP account on the same server. All mails you send will be from that account (check the MAIL-FROM field in the SMTP session). If you have separate personal/work accounts, you are stuck.

Gmail allows you to access external STMP servers with dedicated accounts. This allows you to basically use Gmail as a client to your corporate mail server. I've been using Gmail to consolidate all my mail accounts in different servers. It's really nice.

Oh, and threading “just works” in Gmail.

This hasn't worked in the Android Gmail app for several years now. The option is there, but no matter what I select when replying to an email it will ALWAYS send it from the address it was sent to.

So let's say I have 2 email address, me@gmail.com and me@mydomain.com. My gmail account is setup so I can send from either one. If I get an email sent to me@mydomain.com and I change the From address to me@gmail.com in my reply, it always sends it from me@mydomain.com anyway. It doesn't matter what I select for the from address. This doesn't happen in the normal gmail web interface, it's only the Android app.

The thing is that this used to work a few years ago (Android 2.2 or very early in 2.3). It was broke in an update at some point and still hasn't been fixed. I've tried reporting the bug, and even had a Google employee verify he has the same problem, but it's unfortunately still there. I've verified it with other people, and it's happened on the past 3 Android phones I've had, so it seems to be a universal problem.

I love in particular that the list is sorted in an alphabetical order. It is not exclusive to the Gmail.app for iOS but in the web GUI, it wasn't available a few months ago. If you added an additional mail addresse, the order within your address list sometimes even changed.

I would of course still prefer if I could define the list order (as in Mail.app for iOS and OS X) but an alphabetical order is still better than a more or less random order … :)

It and even works most of the time. I have had it reply with a different email address from the one that an email was sent to

In Sparrow you just need to setup aliases for your account, you'll than have the same feature...

Disagree. The reason that Gmail for iOS and Gmail in general suck is the total lack of support for cryptography within the application (S/MIME, PGP, or other solutions).

As a friend of mine said, "Gmail -- a private conversation between you, me, and 25,000 SREs."

Funny, but not necessarily true. Poking around in someone's personal data is a really, REALLY good way to get fired immediately.

getting caught poking around in someone's personal data is a great way to get fired ;)

also on the HN front page as we speak, beside this entry:

"'Everyone in US under virtual surveillance' - NSA whistleblower"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4874462

Only way to have a truly private conversation is in person...maybe on a boat...a little bit off shore...with the motor idling :)

Better to say "between you, me, and the internet".

Remember that email is typically transmitted between servers in the clear, so it's trivially easy for your messages to be observed by arbitrary third parties.

And the NSA, CIA, FBI, KGB, Honest Achmed, your crazy ex wife/husband/bf/gf/dog, etc.

K9Mail at least provides crypto support, though it's painfully awkward to make use of on mobile.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959

Basically all of iOS has the tiny-text problem (on iPhone, at least) - both Safari and Chrome have zoom that doesn't reflow text, so you either have to read something tiny or frantically scroll left and right to read each line. It gives me a headache, and this is the first thing that's made me think about switching back to Android.

>both Safari and Chrome have zoom that doesn't reflow text

What?! (That doesn't seem right...?)

It's not right, but it's true. No reflow on zoom in the iOS browser or WebViews

Usually it is not a problem because text-block width is a fraction of total page width. The text has around newspaper-column number of characters in a row so the zoom hides navigation and advertisement and makes the page readable.

The rest is fixed by "read later" button if content is worth it or "back" button if it is not.

To be fair, mobile Safari does have the Readability-like 'Reader' mode that presents articles' text reflowed to fit comfortably on the iPhone's screen.

It mentions @media queries working in the iOS Mail app, but as best as I've been able to decipher, they're still fairly broken (whereas Android's Mail app and K-9 aren't).

Specifically, it always reports that the mail is in landscape mode (even in the default portrait) and doesn't set max-width to a larger value when in landscape mode, making it (again, as far as I've been able to figure out) impossible to create different HTML mail layouts for landscape and portrait modes.

They should make it more like the Android version, that one is awesome.

i don't know about that. i often get html-emails from companies which don't fit the screen. sometimes i can align it by adjusting to the left... shouldn't have to.

Agreed on that. HTML e-mails are a pain to view!

The new Gmail update included Pinch-to-Zoom. Check it out in the Settings. Works perfectly, solves this problem quite nicely.

Tip: after zooming in, double-tap the text to reflow it.

aaahhhh thank you!

thank you. strange how this is not default, considering google's own services like youtube sends out wide html-emails.

Point of note: the pinch-to-zoom failure to wrap text to the viewport is also a feature of some Apple apps -- notably Pages, which is very pretty on the iPhone but fundamentally Not Fit For Purpose as a word processor on those devices, unless you habitually write text in a column 5cm wide.

Pages is fine on the iPad's larger screen, which can scale to display a US letter or A4 page reasonably clearly.

I suspect the root of the problem is a misplaced prioritization of presentation over content. Probably the right thing to do with graphics, but a really bad idea when handling text-based documents.

Gmail app, both iOS and Android is full of fail. Too much "clean design" - aka, flat featureless grey on white boxes with icons that mean very little. I hate this new 'minimal' design craze.

Google Apps on my Android always were always one of the worst.

Google Maps - resource hungry, always doing something in the background, slow .. replaced them with much better, unfortunately local, alternative

Google Play - two examples: doesn't prevent phone from losing network so I have to play with the phone in order to download updates; listing my applications always takes about half a minute.. even if I did the same task 5 seconds ago

Google+ - basically unusable, unbearably slow, doing stuff in background all the time, crashed whole system few times

The truth is I don't have the most modern phone, but it isn't the slowest either (it's single core 900MHz w/ 512MB ram). It's running on the latest available android for that device (the device was sold less then a year ago, it's from 2010). Can't imagine how those apps run on older/slower phones.

Side note: Another multi-billion dollar company that can't seem to produce working android application is facebook. That is the single worst application that I have ever used (some were worse (google+), but I can't really talk about "usage" with them). It's getting slowly better, but it's still a crap. Twitter on the other hand is great.

Agreed. I use K9 instead of Gmail. Better in every single way.

What do you use instead of Maps?

I don't use Google+ or Facebook. Thank god for disabling applications. (I'm referring to the ones that are locked to your phone and cannot be uninstalled).

I use Mapy.cz by Seznam (Czech company that only recently lost its 1st position in search to Google (after Google spent billions on advertising)). I find their web maps[1] better than Google maps as well (again, Czech Republic only).

1. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.mapy

2. http://mapy.cz/

Maps doing stuff in background? That's the location service being used by another app, commonly weather apps.

As for G+/Talk, disable sync or sign out of Talk.

Talk works just fine for some reason :)

And is location service tied to application named "Maps"? If so, that might really be the case.. although I only have this problem after I use Maps, not when I use other apps that require location.

The location providers on Android are not tied to any one app, but are system level services that apps register with for updates. Location that takes GPS can take longer to acquire fixes and Google Maps will attempt to use the most accurate fix possible, so if the GPS acquisition is slow, maps will be slow.

I totally understand your points, though. I use an older device with roughly the same specs, and when I was using stock 2.3 it wasn't very fast.

Not to be rude, but most apps on the Play Store are going to run slow with those specs, especially if it's running on a more current version of Android than it was designed for. My G2 used to be blazing fast when it came out two years ago. I wouldn't even dare attempt running anything on that thing now.

Personally, I've found Google's Apps to work the best and look the best...on modern devices.

I understand that general developer doesn't care about part of the users if it would require the extra mile of work. But Google?

It lasted until morning, before I deleted it. While I like the UI to look at, it's not conducive to getting things done.

And I made the mistake of enabling push notifications - only to find my phone covered in notifications when I woke up - I know Google don't really have a better way of doing this due to iOS... but it does beg the question why bother, when you can't better what is already available?

I filter all my addresses to Gmail on my iPhone 5 and it is amazing. I can send from any address as well, which is nice b/c I have about 10 different ones for various businesses. It works well and is easy for me. The Gmail app is essential in my opinion.

I love the app, but there is one thing I'd change to perfect it, because I'm a heavy label user:

When choosing a label, there's no immediate visual feedback to show which label you've selected. This might not sound critical, but using a finger on a moving train can lead to inaccurate pressing! Compare that to the web interface: select a label, and there's immediate feedback saying "this conversation has been moved to/labelled "whatever_the_label_is".

I'd like to either see my selection invert, or a confirmation similar to the web interface.

(And agree with the OP: taking up valuable screen space with a thick border is inefficient).

The subject line and contact info also take up a lot of vertical space. The actual content of the email doesn't start until halfway down the screen. Compare this to iOS Mail where the content starts about 20% down (the contact details are hidden until you click Details).

If the author weren't using an iPhone 5 with the longer screen, the first paragraph of the email would barely be visible.

Used it on my iPad yesterday, and did notice the less-than desirable viewport width. Google seems to have been inspired by webOS's Mail app, but has forgotten that the quick-view could be expanded by pushing the inbox view away so that only the message is in full view.

Also, the grey borders are just a case of prioritizing form over function.

Just testing on my phone, I get the feeling the newsletter this OP has screenshotted has set it's own padding/margins as well, exacerbating the problem. Still, it should have been quite clear when they were designing it that two margins for a 240px width screen is overkill.

However, the inbox screen isn't so spaced out, and relatively condensed. Thankfully

This just shows how you must always optimize the UI for the primary task. It is never acceptable to compromise usability to improve style.

On small devices screen real estate is premium, so don't waste it with margins like this. Though I have to say the design looks nice, too bad it wastes so much space.

The problem with apps that have stock Apple alternatives is that they always feel second fiddle to the OS. Even apps with tons of better features (reminder apps come to mind) often don't offer the same seamless worry-free integration of relatively bare-bones apps like Reminders

I've been pretty happy using Mail with GMail set up as an Exchange host in order to get push. I am glad that Google is putting effort into their client. I couldn't figure out how to get the new Gmail to do a real delete instead of an archive.

> I couldn't figure out how to get the new Gmail to do a real delete instead of an archive.

This is exactly the reason I forwarded all my GMail emails to my iCloud email. There is zero configuration after that. I use Mail.app on my desktop too. GMail is merely an address and an backup archive for me after that.

Head over to http://m.google.com/sync on your phone and you can change the settings to allow proper deletion.

Yup, this is the solution, as weird as it seems to have to go to a Google preferences page to control delete behavior in the iOS mail app.

Speaking of ActiveSync/Exchange, is it possible to use Gmail on the Mac this way?

IMAP works but there's always the 'too many simultaneous connections' issue since Gmail IMAP is limited to 10 simultaneous connections within a certain time frame and you easily reach this number of connections if you access Gmail from 3-4 devices …

Totally agree on the text zoom. I like that the iOS app has text under the icons. On gmail web they don't and I have to think a bit before I click an icon. I feel the earlier versions of web gmail were much more intuitive.

The Verge had some criticisms about the app as well: http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/4/3728548/gmail-2-0-ios-hand...

Another thing that is annoying about it is the fuzzy text when you zoom in. They must be using web views in a non standard way because the built in HTML viewer usually re-renders text as you zoom.

I think that the main problem in the Gmail for iOS is that I can't configure the refresh time. For people who receive lots of e-mails it drains the battery so bad that it last only half a day.

Actually, after 20 mins of use I found it incredibly uncomfortable. I still don't know why they didn't just continue with the fabulous Sparrow client. I'm going back to Sparrow right now.

Am I correct in saying that this is using the technology Google acquired from Sparrow? The swipe-left bar in particular looks very much like the swipe-left bar in Sparrow.

Hah, in my opinion, Gmail for Android still sucks. This is on 2.3 though, so I may be lacking some of the features.

You are. Pinch to zoom was just launched in 4.2 which I believe is only available for ICS and above.

Still so pretty...

/me runs

a second reason, because it's iOS.

Jeez it is a smack in the face to scroll down and see the iOS Mail app after the beautiful Gmail app.

Yeah, overall the interactions and UI are really great. It's a shame the mail rendering isn't quite there.

Yeah, I can't believe they messed that up that badly, the zoomed in screenshot screams FIXME.

What is beautiful about the Gmail app? All the grey? I'm all for clean design but I don't exactly see how it's cleaner or nicer than Mail.app.

I use my nexus and the constant grey puts me off. Very little contrast, very little distinction between what is UI and what is scaffolding. If you're going to do a flat design, the elements have to separate themselves from one another -- things have to be distinct. This is a great example of a flat email interface with basically the same layout as Google's client: http://www.vanschneider.com/work/mail/ everything being #cecece and shifted one direction or the other isn't.

Because it is Gmail?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com