So, I started using inbox a while ago when it was announced and I love it. Really.
What's the state of development of it? Doesn't seems to be moving much and a lot of features from gmail are still missing, and I continue to see dev happening on gmail and not on inbox.
Came to post this as well. Inbox is a great product, but it seems to have been forgotten - probably because most of the users still use gmail, since getting "normies" to switch to anything is near impossible without social pressure being some contributor to the switch. Plus, Gmail still has a ton of features that were never ported over, which will also prevent some advanced users who rely on these features consistently, from switching.
Inbox is in a weird place - the features we want in Gmail are in Inbox. The features we want in Inbox are in Gmail. The mails are in the same place. The web clients are separate codebases. I can't imagine all the talented people working at either team are happy with this situation given the way their contributions end up not coming to us users because of this separation. If anyone here is on either team, or has some insight into this, I'd really like to understand what the thinking is behind this stuff. The same sort of goes for Allo, Hangouts, etc. What gives, Google?
I think you're missing the point of Inbox. It's not supposed to replace Gmail, not now and not ever. It's an additional way of using Gmail, hence why its full name is actually "Inbox by Gmail".
Inbox is an attempt to make Gmail easier to use for the average user who has simple needs, so all the "power user" features you want aren't supposed to be in Inbox. If your needs are complicated, you can just use Gmail. Inbox doesn't really introduce any new features that Gmail cannot do, it simply reframes Gmail features in a different UI and workflow. For example, Inbox's "done" action is available in Gmail, but in Gmail it's called "archive". Same with Inbox's "bundles": they're just called "tabs" in Gmail.
As an Inbox user, I'm pretty happy with the state of Inbox. I don't need extra features get my stuff done in Inbox. Porting every Gmail feature to Inbox is missing the point.
I personally use the snooze feature (time or location-based) quite at lot at work, along with the reminder feature (which also allow to add a note). I forget much less often to take action on an email in a timely manner because of it.
I think the problem is that 10% of Gmail users think Inbox is awesome and the rest think it's godawful for breaking 'feature X' they loved. Where feature X isn't one feature but a thousand tiny things. I think with Add-ons, they're trying to extend Gmail in a way that won't offend anyone married to the current UI.
Came to post this question also. I switched to Inbox when it came out and never looked back. The automated linking of travel emails into a cluster pertaining to the same trip, for example, is extremely useful, and after pinning anything that needs attention, clearing your inbox with the sweep button is amazing. Some clarity from google on the future of these two products would be nice.
Yeah, inbox seems vastly superior to me, with the exception that it runs like absolute shit on Firefox which I can only interpret as intentional, considering I find FF faster than Chrome for a lot of other stuff these days.
Some JS features are faster on Chrome and some on Firefox. Additionally, while Firefox is killing it on CSS and some layout stuff with Stylo and WebRender, JS is the area where Firefox isn't dominating.
It's trivial to explain the speed difference without assuming it intentional. In Inbox's case, sparse arrays were an issue initially[0] (and like many of the perf issues, it's been fixed[1].)
There will always be perf trade-offs. If you find any where they chose X over Y when X and Y are equal on Chrome, and X is faster than Y on Firefox, then let's talk about anti-competitive behavior.
I specifically installed Firefox 57 so that I could try Inbox there, because as you point out, on Firefox 56 it's very slow (especially the initial load).
On Firefox 57 with that new Quantum CSS, I found Inbox to be amazingly fast (I'd say even faster than Chrome on my yoga pro 2 - except for the right pane of Google Hangouts which takes a while to load still)
I completely agree, I found inbox a little while ago and it's amazing. It's cut my time spent on emails by a factor of 10, and I love the inbuilt reminder system.
There are a few minor annoyances but the massive time savings are well worth dealing with them.
Something others haven't mentioned here when discussing the gmail vs inbox situation is the trio of products, Keep + Cal + Inbox, that make for an absolutely _awesome_ reminder workflow/experience.
IMHO if there's one thing missing from Gmail right now is the integration of Reminders from the other products. It doesn't really fit with the gmail workflow though, so I guess it's just another example of the same 'gmail should be more inboxy/inbox should be more gmaily' argument.
We (Streak yc s11) were a launch partner on this and launched our Add-on today. Even though we already have a chrome extension for desktop, add-ons allowed us to live inside the native Gmail mobile apps.
Happy to answer any questions about the add-on platform....
Is there any way to modify the appearance of text within emails? My startup has a popular Chrome extension that works with gmail on desktop, but we'd love to be on native gmail apps also. For context (and to understand why we need to modify the text), see http://www.beelinereader.com
See my other comment on InboxSDK but summary, yes we are using InboxSDK because we made it and because we still want the power it offers on desktop. On mobile we use Add-ons plus a native app that can be deep linked to from the Add-on.
EDIT: if you look at the docs of the www.inboxsdk.com/docs there is a lot of functionality above and beyond the sidebar API that add-ons offers.
I’m unable to install the Streak gmail add-on in my GSuite org. The “install” button is just disabled. Is this due to a gradual rollout on Google’s part? I haven’t been able to find any settings in my admin section that would enable this.
Also, are there any downsides or missing features of the add-on version compared to the extension version?
There is currently a Google bug where admins of a G Suite domain can't install any add-ons.
In terms of functionality, we're keeping our add-on fairly lightweight. On mobile, the add-on lets you deep link into our native apps for more enhanced functionality. On desktop, if you have our extension installed, it just replaces the add-on entirely so you get the most functionality possible.
Gmail is consolidating their dominance with stuff like this. If things start replacing email communication, gmail will just provide it on top which moves us further and further from a standards compliant SMTP GUI that email was.
I haven't found an email client that reliably renders most html, yet we have addons and soon maybe Android apps in your email.
I don't think it's quite so gloomy. A lot of cool add-on functionality relies on semantic markup in the email itself [0]. These are open standards by necessity -- any email provider can add support for them. For example, here's the standard for flight reservations [1].
I'm not sure how widely adopted they are, but Microsoft supports at least event discovery [2].
Annoyingly, though, these markup features still require explicit approval from Google to function in Gmail. They aren't even usable at all for small sites, as one of Google's approval requirements is a "consistent history of sending a high volume of mail from your domain".
I guess Microsoft is close behind and probably leading in the number of paying customers. However, a duopoly isn't that much better either. It's unfortunate that the spirit of the internet that resulted in many open technologies is slowly being circumvented by companies seeking to monopolize. Unlike old monopolies, where breaking apart is reasonably easy, these new monopolies are entrenched right from their technology stack.
Are there any concerns about privacy? I mean now you have applications that will use a platform that Google is known to scan for information.
I know everyone has heard this before, but I would like to see what people think. A couple of days ago, people were all up in arms about phone companies selling your website traffic. What makes Google better than god forbid AT&T or Verizon?
First of all, these are integrations that you explicitly install (like installing an app), so that's obviously opt-in. That's a bit different from the adtech stuff many companies do without any benefit to you.
Second, why do you ask just about Google and not the other companies involved? For example, if you're interested in the Trello integration, you also need to trust Trello with any data you send there. Presumably anyone interested in that particular add-on has already decided to trust both Gmail and Trello with their data, or they wouldn't install it.
Years of Britney Spears Naked Screensavers and malware "removers" have taught us that users are idiots. You can net a bazillion users with one "unlimited space" add-on.
Obviously, there's some vetting but that doesn't always work.
These add-ons could run on Google's servers and only have connectivity to your inbox and session. Instead, this appears to allow companies to do what they like, sharting your data over multiple jurisdictions if they want. Doesn't fill me with confidence.
> First of all, these are integrations that you explicitly install (like installing an app), so that's obviously opt-in.
I don't think the privacy/security concerns should be so cavalierly dismissed. I'm sure I'm not the first to open a friend or relative's computer and discover half a dozen browser toolbars installed. The same is likely to occur here. HN readership may be pretty cautious about this stuff, but HN readership isn't Gmail's only user base.
Google says they no longer scan Gmail for advertising. I guess it depends on how much you trust them, but frankly one's emails are often pretty juicy by themselves, so if you're really worried you should probably not use it at all. I moved off it years ago.
Well, their privacy policy prohibits that sort of thing. It also doesn't make a lot of business sense, as Google's biggest advantage is being able to target ads based on that data.
These add ons are voluntary and you have to enable them. If someone is under the illusion that Google is better at privacy than anyone else they should re-educate themselves about that .
Sounds a lot like Gmail Labs, which was discontinued. I've learned to expect most Google products to be killed off, so I don't even bother starting to use them anymore.
Not sure if it's standard now (I remember enabling it as a gmail labs thing) but the "undo" button that lets you abort sending a mail a few seconds after you clicked the send button is really handy. It captures so many times where you think about something you forgot just after you hit "send".
Labs were experimental features developed by Google itself. These are stable features developed by third-parties. They both extend Gmail, but that's about it.
Logically there are only Google products that still exist, have been killed or have not been created yet.
I expect Google does have some future left in which it will create more products so I wouldn’t say it killed almost all its product except those that still exist.
Is Gmail even their priority anymore? Didn't they come out with Inbox some time back? I always was under the impression that Inbox was going to replace Gmail, but never knew for sure.
It hasn't been discontinued, and some Labs have been promoted to supported features (e.g. "Undo send".) And I always turn on the "Unread message icon" feature, which is still in Labs.
If you are using G Suite, you might need to ask your administrator to enable Labs.
Indeed. Found myself scraping Alphabet products of a list the other day - just can't risk spending months of effort on something that has a good change of disappearing overnight.
Google went from 'I need a good reason why we are not picking Google' to 'Avoid if at all able'.
For a company built on selling, Alphabet has become extraordinarily good at not selling itself.
Does anyone ever want to annotate threads or messages with notes like next actions or why you didn’t reply? I always thought it should be built into gmail, but I suppose an add-on would work.
Not much info in this particular message, but I wonder if this could be used with GPG to send and receive encrypted emails. I'm sure browser sandboxing would be an issue (hard to keep a key private when it's uploaded to another server and used in a browser window)... but still, the possibility would be pretty awesome.
There are extensions that do that well already. But the problem is still that I don't trust the browser with my private key.
I wonder though how reasonable my assumption is. E.g. how many security issues in the past two years could have potentially caused my key to be compromised if I were to use it that way.
The Gmail Add-ons are executed by Gmail and are within Gmail-controlled webpages. Nothing in the add-on is private from Gmail/Google. If you want end-to-end GPG-encryption where the plaintext and keys aren't accessible to Google, then you want to use a browser extension (such as Google's End-to-End extension or ones built off of it: https://github.com/google/end-to-end).
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What's the state of development of it? Doesn't seems to be moving much and a lot of features from gmail are still missing, and I continue to see dev happening on gmail and not on inbox.
Should I be moving back to inbox?
Inbox is in a weird place - the features we want in Gmail are in Inbox. The features we want in Inbox are in Gmail. The mails are in the same place. The web clients are separate codebases. I can't imagine all the talented people working at either team are happy with this situation given the way their contributions end up not coming to us users because of this separation. If anyone here is on either team, or has some insight into this, I'd really like to understand what the thinking is behind this stuff. The same sort of goes for Allo, Hangouts, etc. What gives, Google?
Inbox is an attempt to make Gmail easier to use for the average user who has simple needs, so all the "power user" features you want aren't supposed to be in Inbox. If your needs are complicated, you can just use Gmail. Inbox doesn't really introduce any new features that Gmail cannot do, it simply reframes Gmail features in a different UI and workflow. For example, Inbox's "done" action is available in Gmail, but in Gmail it's called "archive". Same with Inbox's "bundles": they're just called "tabs" in Gmail.
As an Inbox user, I'm pretty happy with the state of Inbox. I don't need extra features get my stuff done in Inbox. Porting every Gmail feature to Inbox is missing the point.
It's trivial to explain the speed difference without assuming it intentional. In Inbox's case, sparse arrays were an issue initially[0] (and like many of the perf issues, it's been fixed[1].)
There will always be perf trade-offs. If you find any where they chose X over Y when X and Y are equal on Chrome, and X is faster than Y on Firefox, then let's talk about anti-competitive behavior.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495498 [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1087963
On Firefox 57 with that new Quantum CSS, I found Inbox to be amazingly fast (I'd say even faster than Chrome on my yoga pro 2 - except for the right pane of Google Hangouts which takes a while to load still)
IMHO if there's one thing missing from Gmail right now is the integration of Reminders from the other products. It doesn't really fit with the gmail workflow though, so I guess it's just another example of the same 'gmail should be more inboxy/inbox should be more gmaily' argument.
https://gsuite-developers.googleblog.com/2017/10/gmail-add-o...
Edit: Looks like you build the add-ons with Google AppsScript. Very similar to Microsoft Office + VBA, on the web this time.
There's a CodeLab tutorial showing how to build a basic add-on that populates a Google Sheets file with receipt data from emails: https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/gmail-add-on...
Happy to answer any questions about the add-on platform....
EDIT: if you look at the docs of the www.inboxsdk.com/docs there is a lot of functionality above and beyond the sidebar API that add-ons offers.
Also, are there any downsides or missing features of the add-on version compared to the extension version?
In terms of functionality, we're keeping our add-on fairly lightweight. On mobile, the add-on lets you deep link into our native apps for more enhanced functionality. On desktop, if you have our extension installed, it just replaces the add-on entirely so you get the most functionality possible.
I haven't found an email client that reliably renders most html, yet we have addons and soon maybe Android apps in your email.
I'm not sure how widely adopted they are, but Microsoft supports at least event discovery [2].
[0] https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/
[1] http://schema.org/FlightReservation
[2] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Automatically-add-t...
edit: formatting
But I don't see that happening with advanced email features. It alls happening outside of the email itself ad is part of the email application.
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I know everyone has heard this before, but I would like to see what people think. A couple of days ago, people were all up in arms about phone companies selling your website traffic. What makes Google better than god forbid AT&T or Verizon?
Second, why do you ask just about Google and not the other companies involved? For example, if you're interested in the Trello integration, you also need to trust Trello with any data you send there. Presumably anyone interested in that particular add-on has already decided to trust both Gmail and Trello with their data, or they wouldn't install it.
Apparently this is what the install screen looks like: https://support.google.com/a/answer/176367?hl=en&ref_topic=1...
Years of Britney Spears Naked Screensavers and malware "removers" have taught us that users are idiots. You can net a bazillion users with one "unlimited space" add-on.
Obviously, there's some vetting but that doesn't always work.
These add-ons could run on Google's servers and only have connectivity to your inbox and session. Instead, this appears to allow companies to do what they like, sharting your data over multiple jurisdictions if they want. Doesn't fill me with confidence.
I don't think the privacy/security concerns should be so cavalierly dismissed. I'm sure I'm not the first to open a friend or relative's computer and discover half a dozen browser toolbars installed. The same is likely to occur here. HN readership may be pretty cautious about this stuff, but HN readership isn't Gmail's only user base.
It's still present and working on my personal Gmail as well as my work Gsuite account. I use a bunch of the features.
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I expect Google does have some future left in which it will create more products so I wouldn’t say it killed almost all its product except those that still exist.
Is there a company for which that phrase isn't true?
If you are using G Suite, you might need to ask your administrator to enable Labs.
If there's one product that would incite the most furor if killed off, it's definitely Gmail.
It's the best email provider around and email is what ties together most peoples' online lives.
It's also at the core of Gsuite for businesses, which I imagine makes it net profitable.
Google went from 'I need a good reason why we are not picking Google' to 'Avoid if at all able'.
For a company built on selling, Alphabet has become extraordinarily good at not selling itself.
It's awesome.
I wonder though how reasonable my assumption is. E.g. how many security issues in the past two years could have potentially caused my key to be compromised if I were to use it that way.