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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.
Rely on them if you dare.
Don't used to using google shit in your workflow
Google is discontinuing a service it started a few years ago?! Glad I was sitting down for that bit of news...
I am shocked. SHOCKED!!
#DeleteChrome
At least this time when Google is killing a product, they're killing one that is redundant with other products.
I guess this is better than Google dropping a third competing email client on us, right? Now, if they could just consolidate their "chat" and "messaging" apps into one...
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.
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Pine is good, but it's not Elm.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Inbox was one of the few Google apps I really liked. Integrated mail and reminders is fantastic. Of course they killed it. This only spurs me to move further away from Google. I've already replaced Play Music with a self hosted solution, the same for Drive, Play Books, Keep, and Calendar. Switched back to Firefox after 8 years of Chrome. If only someone made a decent Linux phone.
Talked to a Google support rep via Google One yesterday, and according to them there is no _official_ word that Google is terminating Inbox, for what that's worth.