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> Android's GMail client is very polished and there's not much in it that's specific to Gmail, it could be a generic email client that works with POP3/IMAP/SMTP and other standards as well. The experience of users that aren't into Android's own services do suffer.

GMail uses a proprietary protocol that is decidedly not imap. It has features like colorized labels and inbox prioritizing that just isn't present in imap. Furthermore it has completely different performance characteristics (e.g it is much faster) than what imap email can provide. No one seem to have any details on exactly what the protocol is or how it works. They definitely seem to not want any third party clients accessing gmail though. Otherwise they would have published a protocol specification a long time ago.

> GMail uses a proprietary protocol that is decidedly not imap

A thousand times, this.

Using a traditional IMAP client such as offlineimap makes this painfully obvious. Gmail synchronizes labels as "folders", not "tags", for some unknown reason, which means that mail in the inbox ends up getting duplicated on disk under "All Mail", and then again for every single label attached to that label.

Archiving hijacks the way that deleting works, and while clients can adjust to this, it breaks the way IMAP is supposed to work. If clients have to add special cases to interact with your service, that means you're going off-protocol!

Even the login is different. On IMAP, your username should be "foo", not "foo@example.com".

foo@example.com is a perfectly valid IMAP username. How else could a email service provider host multiple domains on one endpoint? For example Rackspace does this through imap.emailsrvr.com.

> I actually play around with an old Galaxy S on top of which I installed Cyanogenmod without any of Google's Apps. The only problem is that developers only publish their apps on Google Play, which is a shame, given that Android does allow you to install apps from third party sources and you could have a good experience just with stock Android.

I went through the same process of installing Cyanogenmod without Google Apps and it made me wonder why developers of free apps don't distribute them outside Play e.g. on their sites. I understand paid apps and/or apps that have in app purchase but there are a lot of just free apps that just can't be downloaded. Any theories?

Well one theory is that simply setting up a site that you can download an APK from is a hassle. It either costs you bandwidth if it's your own server, or has terrible UX if it is hosted via a share site.

There's always https://f-droid.org - it has somewhat vetted free-as-in-freedom apps that must compile from source.

Oh, come on, putting a 20 MB binary somewhere is cheap and easy.

I think developers don't put APKs anywhere else because they think they won't have an audience for those anyway. But it's a pity anyway. For example Humble Bundle packs with Android games were quite successful and the distribution method was through download links.

I agree that it is a pity. When/if I get around to developing Android apps, I will be definitely distributing packages that way.

However, I would like to point out that the Humble Bundle packs, while available via download links, also is available for download using a Humble Bundle app that acts like a package manager. I don't know how much that would change things, success-wise, but I thought it was worth noting.

> What I don't like about Android is that it doesn't come with a good email client that's not GMail.

That would be like saying that the default camera app does not come with filters, shaders and other features that you like. What Google does is, gives a good enough app for generic use and leaves options open for developers to make better things and put them on the Play Store.

If Google starts incorporating all such features, it'll get much more difficult for developers to earn through the store.

Yeah, but the email app on iOS is pretty polished and nowadays people expect the stock browser and the stock email app to be pretty good, especially on mobile devices. I'm not saying that Android's out of the box functionality should encompass everything, just the basic necessities, like email and web browsing. And I don't want people without an Android to get the wrong idea - Android does come with a standard email client, it's just that it's much, much less polished than the GMail app, which is a shame.

Is GMail subject to the same task killer that 3rd party apps are? I suspect it isn't.

If that's true then Google has given itself a good monopoly for email on its own OS, much like Microsoft did for Internet Explorer.

Are you referring to how Android will reclaim memory from inactive processes? Android handles memory differently than you expect, it tries to keep thinks in memory and only kills apps if it needs their memory back for a more demanding process.

Google consolidating most APIs into Play Services would ensure it's constantly active and never purged from memory, but the same isn't true of Gmail or other Google Apps. They can and are purged from memory as other apps demand more memory. That being said, I've encountered very few situations where any app gets purged from memory. About the only time this happens is if I play a game like Galaxy On Fire or decide to open 100 tabs in Chrome.

Yes I was, glad to hear GMail is subject to the same rules as other apps. Not sure what you mean by "Google consolidating most APIs into Play Services would ensure it's constantly active and never purged from memory"

> Not sure what you mean by "Google consolidating most APIs into Play Services would ensure it's constantly active and never purged from memory"

A lot of common APIs (Location API, Maps API, Play Games API, Push Notifications API, etc) have been consolidated under the Google Play Services umbrella process. Since these common APIs are used by lots of applications, this would ensure the Play Services process never gets booted from memory.

It also has the added benefit that applications using push notifications like Gmail don't need to maintain a background service because they can rely on Google Play Services to activate them as needed. Location based apps like Yelp can determine your location more quickly because Google Play Services is constantly monitoring it. All while reducing the over all memory foot print of applications because they're all deferring to Google Play Services.

Google can also change their APIs for services, upgrade to new protocols like SPDY, and developers don't need to update their applications because Google just needs to maintain the interface to Google Play Services. It's pretty clever.

Your suspicion is wrong and really, really, out there as well. I'm surprised to hear someone thinks this.