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Google is Killing Its 4-Yr-Old Inbox Email App (fastcompany.com) 64

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.

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Google is Killing Its 4-Yr-Old Inbox Email App

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12, 2018 @01:45PM (#57299638)

    Rely on them if you dare.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.
    • Fixed the title for you. :)
      • Fixed the title for you. :)

        It's not the fate that's an issue. It's the rate at which a company products or platforms from cradle to grave in such short order.

        That's abnormal, and sometimes I wonder the wisdom of such a practice.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Google are fucking morons. They put out like 10 products that do the same thing, then kill them all off a year later.

  • Yup (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12, 2018 @01:52PM (#57299726)

    Don't used to using google shit in your workflow

    • by Anonymous Coward

      don't use SaaS in your workflows.

  • WHAT?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday September 12, 2018 @01:57PM (#57299774)

    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!!

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "Google kills four year old" .. a better headline, or clickbait? ;)

  • Dupe (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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...

  • by PeeAitchPee ( 712652 ) on Wednesday September 12, 2018 @02:15PM (#57299926)
    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.
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They spent all that money working on a UI that is designed to anger you. Specifically you.

      Yes, they are out to get you. Watch your back. Google is on the hunt.

    • Oddly, you're one of the few that has that problem. It's email, not a database, it's not complex.
      Btw, it does indent messages in a thread, I just checked to verify in my google mail. At least the web interface, since I don't use the app.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Use the basic HTML version you get when you disable Javascript. It is quick and efficient.

    • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      Not the worst, the Outlook webmail is way worse.
      All the bad things about GMail are here too. But GMail is well polished, Outlook is not. The Windows version is OK.

    • Don't know about anyone else, but I use gmail because of the excellent spam filtering. Do I use Google to read the mail? Of course not. Their mail stuff is slow, clunky, and very hard to use. Google supports imap/smtp, so I just read and send mail with Alpine. But I reckon a locally hosted GUI email program would work just as well.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Gmail's UI is just absolutely horrible. Why must it be so awful?

      Judging by the evidence they put before us, it seems that Google devs have never understood what makes a good UI, and even less do they have any appreciation for what makes a bad one. This may be why all their client-side applications have always been an embarassment and barely serviceable. We use them because their server-side is free, despite their client sides being dramatically worse than the GUIs of applications in the 1980's.

      This isn't

    • Perhaps the totalitarian Progressives who control Google have created such a hostile work environment that most of the talented programmers have left.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • So I like the Inbox filtering and folders for prioritizing, and don't much care for the idea of a third party client since those can only have other security issues.

    The Android Gmail app does this? Or am I using web Gmail to do the filtering?

    Am I too lazy to figure this out directly?

    • So I like ... folders for prioritizing

      Surprise! Gmail doesn't have folders. It has Labels. If you're using labels as simple replacements for folders, you are missing one of the benefits of Gmail.

      For example, imagine you receive a new email that has to do with a proposed shipping contract of snowshoes to Alaska. If you have labels for Proposals, Contracts, Snowshoes, and Alaska you apply these labels to the email and remove the inbox label. Now it is easy to click on the Alaska label to see all correspondence that deals with Alaska. You

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday September 12, 2018 @02:40PM (#57300164)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I had never heard of it until today.
  • 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.

    • by arunvk ( 2017156 )
      can you please provide more details on the "self hosted solution"?
      • Plex Media Server does a similar job with regards to your own media files, which is what I assume the GP meant by "self-hosted."

  • Would Google aid in migration of a few differences between Inbox and Gmail?

    Inbox mark as Done is in sync with Gmail archive
    Inbox read doesn't seem to equate with Gmail read
    Inbox pinned is also not the same as Gmail starred

    Please create a migration tool, so all Pinned messages would be starred and all Read messages are also marked as read in Gmail.

  • How they can expect a customer to adopt their product when they show no commitment to it? How many times do we have to waste time learning, using new thing that goes into obsolete mode? Throw it at the wall and see if it sticks no longer works with their approach.
  • by Isarian ( 929683 ) on Thursday September 13, 2018 @09:53AM (#57305846)

    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.

  • This is a terrible decision. Inbox on the desktop and mobile are terrific products. I don't see ANYTHING wrong with them. I wonder what sort of shitty data-driven decision making was behind this.

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