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Gmail on Android is such a shitty locked-down experience. Want to create an appointment from an email? Nope. Want to set a reminder about an email? Nope. Want t
by guelo 9y ago
Gmail on Android is such a shitty locked-down experience. Want to create an appointment from an email? Nope. Want to set a reminder about an email? Nope. Want to link to an email from a notes or other app? Nope.
OK, well now maybe. If you become a "business partner" with them and shove your product into whatever grand strategery they're cooking up this quarter.
It's sad to think how Android was envisioned as this open system where apps freely communicate with each other but Google has been working overtime to kill that vision.
Google in general just hates open these days.
- late2part 9y agoJust Like Java (TM)? Google is the new Sun Microsystems?
- TYPE_FASTER 9y agoExcept Google figured out how to monetize the success. I knew it was bad when the JRE install started asking if I wanted to install search bars in my browser.
- chiefalchemist 9y agoI think, per Zero to One, Thiel (for one) would argue otherwise. Take away search (read: ads on SERPs) and Google is close to an average, if not subpar, "success story."
- dannyw 9y agoTake away the iPhone and Apple is a failing computer manufacturer. Take away Windows and Microsoft is a mediocre console maker and makes Office. So?
- chiefalchemist 9y agoRead Zero to One. It'll explain the situation better than I can in a tiny textbox :)
- kennysmoothx 9y agoYou can't even have an HTML signature on Gmail for Android. Something so trivial missing from Google's main email client.
- lqdc13 9y agoTo provide a counterpoint, I think it's great the way it is in this respect. I don't want any of these features and wouldn't want others to use things like HTML signatures.
- wmccullough 9y agoYou are the exception, not the rule.
- notyourwork 9y agoI agree, a few less signatures in the world isn't a bad thing.
- tempestn 9y agoWould be nice to be able to configure different (plain text) signatures for my different email addresses though.
- lucasverra 9y ago> You can't even have an HTML signature on Gmail for Android. Do not know for android but next sentence is true You can have an HTML signature on Gmail for IOS. Basically you setup html signature on web desktop client, then send email through mobile app without signature and gmail does the rest (fetch your hmtl signature)
- ksk 9y agoI think the problem is, fundamentally, lock-in is often a lucrative strategy, open isn't. The internet is "accidentally" open, when it comes to protocols like SMTP, HTTP, etc, I think primarily because it was more of an research/educational network. The commercial enterprises (AOL, CompuServe) were proprietary and walled off.
- NegativeLatency 9y agoLooks like the old Microsoft embrace extend extinguish to me.
- hkmurakami 9y agoDoes Outlook on mobile provide these? Iirc desktop outlook could create events/reminders/tasks linked to emails in your inbox.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dalemyers 9y agoYes! (I'm the dev who implemented them in Outlook Mobile). I think you are thinking of COM add-ins though, which were significantly more powerful, but a security risk. The new JS based approach, which has been in place for a few years, can't do quite as much, but is much much safer.
- azernik 9y agoThose actions are on the e-mail sender to implement; GMail has an open specification for an e-mail to provide a structured representation of data it contains. https://gsuite-developers.googleblog.com/2013/05/introducing-actions-in-inbox-powered-by.html https://gsuite-developers.googleblog.com/2013/05/introducing...
- guelo 9y agoRight, a corporate spammer can tell google that an email is a calendar event (valuable data!). But the receiving user can't do it themselves using some other calendar app.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y agoIn android's intents model it's the email app so that would need to use the create event intent to send the data to the calendar. To do this the calendar would need to access the emails - which would need either IMAP built in to the calendar app [EDIT: or to change the android permission model]. Edited - finished sentence
- ptx 9y agoI believe the idea is (or was) that the e-mail app will use a "content provider" component[1] to give other apps access to data as appropriate. [1] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/content-provider-basics.html https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/content...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- azernik 9y agoThe point of this structured data format is that you don't need to give the calendar app fill access to the email; just to the attached calendar info included in the email, which can be attached to the intent.
- michaelmior 9y agoI'm not sure what how Gmail is particularly locked-down compared to any other app. I'm not an Android developer, but it seems like there's not really a great way to add functionality to an app as a third party. If you want an app that does those things, you can still connect it with a Gmail account. In fact, there are many apps designed to connect with Gmail and add new features.
- guelo 9y agoAndroid is designed from the ground up to enable this kind of thing. It has a powerful cross-app Intent system that could allow sharing of emails, deeplinking into gmail, broadcasting email changes, allow other apps to change email status, etc.
- gravypod 9y agoFrom the programming and functionality perspective that's fantastic. From the data security perspective that's a nightmare.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- KingMachiavelli 9y agoI don't think androids intent system has any large security implications (I think it has had some but in general). But what I find more interesting/suprising how often I read about these types of concerns given that desktop operating systems provide very limited protection in this area e.g firefox can read all my emails since thunderbird and firefox are run as the same user.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y agoI think the concerns come from the side of people (legal and real) that want to store data and perform computation on other people's devices without the owner being able to control things. What do I mean by this? Anyone with a 'private' API, anyone who's business model involves DRM and anyone who thinks that a remote wipe of an unwilling device should be possible.
- archon810 9y agoI'm going to use this space to complain that there's still not a way to delete single messages on Android instead of the whole thread. This is possible on the web, and I've been asking Gmail for this simple function for years, yet they continue to avoid adding it in.
- ilteris 9y agoJust curious, why would you delete a message on a thread? Here is my Gmail on Android workflow: I swipe to right and archive the thread after I read the thread. It goes away from my inbox. Once someone adds a new mail to the chain thread re appears in my mailbox. I read it and archive it again. I rarely delete a mail.
- hueving 9y agoUseless side conversations that spun off from the original email. Or even worse, when gmail smashes a message in there that doesn't belong in the thread at all.
- lloeki 9y agoSomeone emails sensitive material that you don't want persisted (e.g a password) in your account. Yes it may keep being persisted somewhere else due to the nature of email but hey, it very much depends on your threat model, you don't control what the sender decides to send anyway, and you can do a best effort for it not to become a liability on you.
- jdeibele 9y agoSometimes mail bounces. I liked to delete those messages off the thread. I find that using Gmail with mailing more than X people is impossible because the replies all get mushed together. I now change the subject line for individual replies so I don't get lost.
- pjmlp 9y agoWhat?!? I do it all the time, just a simple swipe left and it is deleted. You just need to change the default from archive to delete on the settings panel.
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- bitmapbrother 9y agoSo why not just use another email client besides Gmail? And when you find one you like you can even set it as your default email client.
- sorenjan 9y agoThe worst thing about Gmail on Android for me is that it doesn't deliver mails reliably. Sometimes when I open the web client on my computer I'm greeted by a list of unread emails, and almost immediately my phone fires of the notification for new mail, even though some of them can be several days old. This indicates that it's Google's servers that isn't sending the notification to my phone when mail arrives, but I consider them to be part of the same system and don't really care where the failure is. Does anybody else have problems with mails not being delivered to their phones until hours or days after they've arrived in the inbox?
- nsriv 9y agoThis sounds like a push/background data issue, where refreshing forces the phone to update. I haven't had this issue since my OG HTC EVO, but toggling Sync on an account basis in the app could help. There was also a catastrophic bug in both Gmail and Inbox about a month ago where emails wouldn't notify, might be worth an update if you haven't in a while.
- atomicnumber1 9y agoHave you tried inbox?
- colordrops 9y agoIt works OK if you are willing to submit to their new paradigm, but some people like a traditional inbox. Try Aquamail for instance. It's what gmail would be if it worked properly.
- kleff 9y agoSeconding Aquamail, by far the best email client I've used for Android.
- corndoge 9y agogoogle doesn't hate open, they give us a lot of quality free / open source software. being who they are, they also make proprietary products. I'd take a world with google's contributions to foss than one without.
- arnoooooo 9y agoWhat bugs me the most is offline use. If you have unreliable network coverage, like I do everyday in the subway, the damn thing tries to connect for every action and then just become unresponsive if the connection fails. You have to activate airplane mode so it'll know not to try to access the network.