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Google is Killing Its 4-Yr-Old Inbox Email App (fastcompany.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Back in 2014, the folks at Google responsible for Gmail did something unexpected: They introduced a new email app. On the back end, Inbox was the same thing as Gmail, and worked with your existing Gmail address. But as a user experience, as then-senior VP Sundar Pichai explained in a blog post, Inbox was "designed to focus on what really matters." It was conceived with mobile devices in mind and ditched a decade's worth of Gmail cruft in favor of tools focused on email efficiency, such as the way it displayed attachments right in the inbox view and incorporated a built-in task manager.
Over the subsequent years, Inbox been a proving ground for features -- such as "Smart Reply" --which later made their way into Gmail, especially with the latter's sweeping new upgrade. So much of Inbox has rubbed off on Gmail, in fact, that it shouldn't come as a complete shock that Google has decided that Inbox has served its purpose. The company is announcing today that it's decided to discontinue the app, which will fade away by the end of next March.
Over the subsequent years, Inbox been a proving ground for features -- such as "Smart Reply" --which later made their way into Gmail, especially with the latter's sweeping new upgrade. So much of Inbox has rubbed off on Gmail, in fact, that it shouldn't come as a complete shock that Google has decided that Inbox has served its purpose. The company is announcing today that it's decided to discontinue the app, which will fade away by the end of next March.
I dare. They are always cutting edge with enhanced features, and at such time as Mountain View sends them off into the sunset there is always a seamless transition to something else or at a minimum a way to get your stuff out of it before it's gone. Great job guys.
I'm sure there's someone who can explain it to me, but Gmail's UI is just absolutely horrible. Why must it be so awful? It's not like Google doesn't have the money to make it better. It is literally impossible for mere mortals to understand to which specific part of a thread they're replying. Would indenting the messages in a thread kill them or something? If they hadn't built an entire ecosystem around it, Gmail would have gone the way of the dodo years ago.