Show HN: InboxSDK by Streak (YC S11) – Build Apps inside Gmail

This is pretty cool!

What I am really dying/desperate for is a group chat feature within Gmail where the chat rooms are permanent. I thought it was the biggest opportunity for years. Slack built a billion $ plus business of group chat outside of gmail. I am sure there is a reasonable sized opportunity for group chat within Gmail!

some more info on this here https://www.inboxsdk.com/terms

Thanks for this.

We're adding licenses to our examples that we have on GitHub and we're also adding a pointer from our inboxsdk.js file to our terms of service.

Over a longer time horizon, we plan on open sourcing the entire implementation of the InboxSDK but just not yet.

Why don't you host the source code on GitHub?

What prevents Google closing the door on this?

Very cool wrappers, I've used Streak off and on for a while and definitely appreciate how well it integrates with gmail.

Do you have any notion of how fragile things are when dom-hacking? Do you have to constantly keep up with google's updates or are things fairly stable? i.e. how often will I need to update and/or patch an extension to maintain support (in your experience so far)?

Great job and initiative! Gmelius Founder here. A few questions:

i) Are you planning to make the whole implementation Open Source?

ii) Say I wish to adopt and use your SDK in my current Gmail/Inbox extensions (>100K daily users), may I expect the implementation of a fixed upper limit on the number of transmissions in the coming months (which could endanger the reliability of my service for my users)?

iii) While the SDK currently only focuses on the UI, are you planning to add more "complex" interactions, such as Gmail filters/Gmail preferences ? If yes, feel free to get in touch. I will be happy to help.

Congrats, again.

Wow, this is amazing! Thank you for doing this! I honestly believe this is could be the most impactful innovation to come to the email space in years.

InboxSDK was obviously a ton of work. What is your business model for it?

Yup - this is great for getting at some of the backend data in gmail, the InboxSDK is designed to let you build apps inside the Gmail frontend experience.

Creator of gmail.js here. Can confirm

Your intro video is waaaay too long, and after looking at it I am not even sure it was an intro video. The email written in the beginning, it never came back to it.

Lost interest halfway through, I think (there are no controls).

In my experience (I've built a gadget for our internal use, to create tickets on our software from emails), the gadgets are fairly limited, both in terms of the content they can access (only the first 1000 characters, and no attachments) and in terms of UI (you get a small bar below the email - no integration with the rest of the interface).

Even for our simple use case, which is essentially a button that makes an HTTP request to a web service with the email fields, it felt limited.

It also suffers from poor debugging tools. They made some changes that broke our gadget (I think it was the deactivation of OAuth 1.0) and there's no way of knowing why it isn't loading, it just doesn't.

Nylas is really cool.

If I remember correctly they are building a base email application that can be extended with plugins (like the atom editor). This does require people to adopt their email client.

The InboxSDK takes a different approach in that it lets you extend Gmails functionality and write apps for Gmail. End users don't have to switch their email client (assuming their using the gmail web client)

We (streak) keep the SDK up to date. The JavaScript you put in your extension remotely loads the actual implementation of the SDK. If gmail changes, we change the implementation (fast) and your users get the change automatically. You the app developer dont need to do anything or even update your extension.

Cofounder of Streak and helped write a lot of the InboxSDK. I can't give a definitive answer right now because we don't use Angular and thus don't have much experience with it. If you're able to specify a DOM node as the root of an Angular instance then you should be able to make it work.

If you try to make the top html tag as your root you'll probably run into a bad time particularly if other extensions make the same assumption. One major difference between writing an app for Gmail vs your own app is that multiple apps can and usually are running at the same time. This was one of the main motivations behind the SDK since many of our bug reports were a result from extension compatibility issues.

We do e2e testing with selenium/webdriver - so it's definitely doable. Tip for e2e testing is to pay for some extra Google Apps accounts so you can run your tests in parallel.

Sorry not at the moment. Actually Outlook has a really great API to write JS/HTML based apps for their desktop client, web client and mobile client. See https://dev.outlook.com/MailAppsGettingStarted/GetStarted

It's a well maintained schlep of a DOM hacking API that makes complex interaction in a hugely important installed base of 1 billion users (previously nearly impossible) possible. Just because you understand the mechanism doesn't mean you should demean the herculean efforts of other good hackers.

Also innovation isn't the idea. Innovation is actually implementing it.

I have a hard time following this reasoning. Of course almost anything new could have been done by anyone. The nature of invention and innovation is that someone figured something out. People could have (and did) say the same thing about Facebook, Dropbox, and a number of other "revolutionary" companies/products. What matters is that someone did it and is packaging it in a way to solve problems and improve the lives of others.

Perhaps "revolutionary" is just marketing fluff, but why get hung up on subjective semantics?