A more modern Gmail app for Android
gmailblog.blogspot.com
gmailblog.blogspot.com
I'm happy about these recent app developments but all I really want for Christmas is a marginally newer Google Finance. It's been like ten years. The webapp still uses Flash.
For me, the poor use of screen real estate was the showstopper for Inbox.
I realize I may have different tastes in which case I think the "Display Density" is an OK compromise (despite that the default is all that usually really matters).
I still think, no matter what some of my friends say, it's better than yahoo finance. Although, I think it gets the market cap wrong with a few stocks.
Things I dislike:
- The empty K9mail-errors virtual folder that I can't hide.
- The completely nonsensical sorting of folders (alphabetical by Folder Display Class, but there's no visual distinction between display classes, just an arbitrary point where your folder alphabetization resets).
- The quadrumvirate of Folder Display Class, Folder Sync Class, Folder Push Class, and Folder Notification Class are completely inscrutable.
- Even if you understand the class system, setting them requires one long press and 9 clicks per folder.
- I have to reach all the way to the top left of my phone to go from my inbox back to the list of folders, instead of following the common UI pattern of allowing me to pull in the folder list with an edge swipe. Tapping the top left is becoming more difficult with each increase in display size.
- I can't reliably refresh the folder list from my server, especially when it comes to special folder labels (Sent / Drafts / Spam / Trash / Archive)
So, it's mostly that the UI is pretty bad. Not unusably so, mind you, but neither is Emacs. The catch is, I just don't understand what benefit I'm getting from struggling with that interface.
And the issues are pretty endemic to the data model that K9 is built upon. To fix this, you'd need to completely re-think the interface and throw out the entire class system, which would raise another round of questions regarding how to handle selective mailbox synchronization, etc.
Of course, they used to let us disable them (in the desktop site). Now they're a key feature. That's progress, I guess.
They are not mandatory in the new Gmail app. I have been using a build of 5.0 for the last few days, and it provides a normal inbox as all previous versions.
Interestingly moving away from Gmail took me totally out of the Google world. I just switched to an iPhone from a Nexus 5 as the Nexus 6 was just too big and I have very happy using no Google account/services (outside of search).
I wanted to try Inbox and got an invite on day 1 but have not bothered to try it yet as it would mean using Gmail again.
Google bring back free EAS please!
Also it always annoyed me how on Android they have two email apps, one for Gmail and one for other Email. Crappy experience really. The Gmail app should support other providers. I know it is coming soon but it should have from day one to be honest.
Admittedly I'm an Android user with limit experience with stock iOS mail app. Is the iOS mail app really that much better than the Gmail app?
I run both Mail.app and Gmail.app on my iPhone because I'll often get the push notification for Gmail.app, tap the notification to open the email, get frustrated and tired waiting for it to load and just go manually refresh Mail.app and see it almost instantly.
Lockscreen actions & swipe-down notification actions = holy grail for email triage. Only the built-in mail client has it.
It's not clear that Inbox is the right way to look at email for the majority of users, and I'm saying that as a user/tester. I've had to drop back to the regular GMail app do do things a couple of times and Inbox has crashed twice on me.
Note that the GMail client did take on some of the look and feel such as the (+) widget on the bottom right.
I have also used the pin and reminder feature a few times. I still think it's a weird thing to include with email, but it was helpful.
It definitely feels like a bit push for 'lock in' (not that gmail really needs that...).
If I am wrong, someone please tell me how to do so from a list view.
[A horrible mistake if it's true... Labels are a significant advantage of gmail over many other email clients.]
Sometimes I like to peruse the ones that I've not yet acknowledge receipt of and either j/k + x to select the ones I want to dismiss outright, which I can still do in Inbox, and then shift-i/click mark as read to mark em my equivalent of 'done'...
The actions presented in Inbox will leave the 'unread' business to ever grow and clutter any IMAP connected application and searches like is:unread.
Edit: Maybe the more troubling aspect of the removal of the 'unread' handling is that these emails will certainly go unseen/missed which is bad.
When I added my non-Gmail account to the app, I only saw traffic direct to the IMAP server, and nothing to Google servers.
One way to test this though would be to setup outbound filtering (see my previous commments), and to use the always-on VPN functionality on your phone to shunt your traffic through said filter. This would allow you to see if any of your emails are being exfiltrated without your knowledge.
I haven't tested this yet myself.
InBox is very nice, BTW. The web client is OK on my laptop, the iPad InBox app is nice to use, and for me the Android InBox app is such a hugely better experience than Gmail.
The bottom bar for only three androids buttons is a huge waste, but they've painted themselves in a corner, there.
Conversation view is the single worst software feature ever developed for any piece of software ever made.
Boy I wish I could turn it off in the android gmail client.
I find emails much easier to deal with when the actual emails are in the list, rather than the conversations - although when displaying the message there's no reason not to show it in the context of the conversation.
I always turn it off, but I think conversation view might be worth it with the following changes:
1. When viewing a conversation, always expand all email and cut quoted text from each email. The fact that quoted text is shown which duplicates email in the same conversation makes for a horrible mess.
2. Use the proper headers (Message-ID, IIRC) to determine which emails belong to the same conversation, rather than the current fuzzy-logic based on the subject and current phase of the moon. At the very least, implement this logic: two separate emails, neither of which are a reply to another email, do NOT belong to the same conversation.
Will be available on the playstore in a few days. But can download it from Android Police here: http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/10/31/gmail-5-0-exchange-s...
You can download and install the latest version from here if you don't want to wait: http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/gmail/gmail-5-0-1556...
Because one of the whole points of having service-based software is that you can present different UIs on top of it for different audiences with the same backend, and this is a realization of that ability.
Because Inbox is a fairly radical change with a strongly-opinionated workflow, while Gmail is -- while still advancing -- a relatively conservative, traditional email client. Having separate apps means people who are happy with the basic Gmail app and fairly conservative (in terms of workflow) improvements it gets are free to stick with it and not abandoned, while those who have (the frequently cited) problems with classic email that Inbox is designed to address can move to it and not be held back by the traditional design of email clients.