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In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users
- moocowtruck 8y agoim not sure whats going on in google when it comes to email, but i really hope when this new look is enabled again in 2 weeks i can still go back to classical...
- rch 8y agoSame here. I've been accepting the new look when prompted to try it out, but I keep switching back within a few hours. I hope those metrics mean something.
- trendia 8y agoI'm sure one of their metrics is "time on site", which often doesn't distinguish between "spends more time because they enjoy the product" and "spends more time because they can't find the things they're looking for and are becoming very frustrated with your service"
- thwy12321 8y agoAre you suggesting google is using their analytics data naively? With all due respect, these large tech corporations are ran by adults who understand user experience.
- briandear 8y agoThen explain Material Design? When I have to hunt around and try to figure out what an icon actually means, that isn’t demonstrating an understanding of UX. Google UX is “great” if you already know how to use it. Apple UX by comparison is friendly even to complete rookies. The only Google UX I actually like is their search page.
- farhang 8y agoThe latest UI changes(all the rounded corners and soft shadows, for example) in Chrome and elsewhere seem to show that they're even moving away from Material Design too,after years of hyping it
- matwood 8y agoMy time on site went to zero. When I saw this coming after it took forever for Inbox to update for the iPhonex, I moved to Mail.app. Another annoying side note. Google recently forced the switch from hangouts to meet, and meet video chat doesn’t work in Safari.
- jotm 8y agoYou can always use an IMAP client and never look back heh
- VonGuard 8y agoI'd settle for them actually releasing new visual themes for Gmail. They've had the same cartoony themes for near 8 years now I think. Maybe longer. I liked them initially, but that was it. They don't even allow anyone to submit their own or anything like that....
- mxfh 8y agoI would be happy if the let me keep the classic gmail already. They are quite pushy about the UI switch lately, if you reverted back to the old look.
- krackers 8y agoI think they're going to prevent opting-out past end of september
- briandear 8y agoI just use my Apple Mail client and never open gmail. Not sure if the attraction of checking email in a web browser.
- paublyrne 8y agoThe new look Gmail has performed very poorly for me. Hanging for extended periods while changing views, and during search. I'm not sure why a UI refresh would have such an effect but I've been avoiding switching because of this
- dawnerd 8y agoI hate their “new” tabs that tries to categorize emails. It’s just extra clicks to get to the emails I want. It’s forced me to go back to a dedicated email app.
- orky56 8y agoThe feature/lab "Multiple Inboxes" overrides this. That's why I have been using and continue to use through Inbox and all the latest Gmail changes.
- bootlooped 8y agoI wish there were something in between Multiple Inboxes and tabs. I would like to make my own tabbed categories for my inbox.
- fooker 8y agoYou are looking for Labels.
- placuaf 8y agoWhat are you talking about man? You can easily turn it off in "configure inbox" section.
- alexnewman 8y agoYea but disables other things as well. Like the ability to snooze
- andrewstuart 8y agoGoogle's shutdown of products and APIs seems to have led to critical level of trust loss amongst developers and influencers. It's time for Google to either fix this or get out of providing services and APIs to developers. Google doesn't seem to put any weight at all on the outcry every time its shutters another service/API. The trust must be restored. Google doesn't seem to understand that when they shut service X, that their (potential) customers for service Y (such as Google Compute Engine) become concerned that service Y will be shut down too. To put a positive suggestion forward, Google could consider giving all services a "sunset guarantee". A "sunset guarantee" is a commitment that the service will be shut down only with a minimum notice period of say for example 5 years.
- smt88 8y agoMy company switched from AWS to Azure without considering Google's Cloud at all, and the loss of trust is the reason.
- fartcannon 8y agoOut of the fire and into the flames with choices like that though, eh.
- mdtusz 8y agoBest of luck. I've found azure far more difficult to manage even simple things with than on AWS. Even spinning up a single simple development server feels far more complicated.
- praneshp 8y agoDid you consider Google cloud, and reject it because you don;t trust Google? that's different from not considering gcp at all :)
- ldiracdelta 8y agoWith respect to googlers, I 100% do not even consider google solutions because I have so little trust that what I do on whatever platform they role out this week, however great it may be, will actually still work in one year.
- TimTheTinker 8y agoI don't think Google cares whether its users are "passionate" or not. They've reached market saturation, so further spread of their products through word-of-mouth (via passionate users and such) isn't a goal at this time. With regard to their Internet service products, their goal seem to be to monetize the user base effectively, while avoiding wasting funds on unnecessary developer time. To that end, many of their products seem to exist as short-term bets or "experiments", ostensibly to give users something great/interesting, but internally justified by the extra data or "research" those products will generate. See Google Voice (angle: voicemails help train Google Assistant), Inbox (angle: research on some email ideas for potential incorporation into GMail), etc. Google's cultural fixation on decision-making based on data and statistics will bite them eventually. It may help them squeeze the market, but it won't help them care about other people.
- joering2 8y agoPrecisely. I can be as pissed at Google as they come, ready to pick up my pitchfork, but at the end of the month when I spent $120,000 on adwords and made $280,000 in profit as a return, I will gladly tattoo Google logo on my chest. The scary part is they will sunset gmail eventually. I know from someone inside “L team” that founders hate how much headache gmail brings for such little return. Initially started at the boom of free email providers with fancy always-updating clock of how many extra megabytes you just got in last few seconds, fastforward today there is no money to be make in providing free email. As they failed to secure sale for a reasonable amount and on fair conditions, expect eventually they will offer to keep paid accounts and auto forward anyone else to another provider for a year or so and then sunset gmail free only leaving gmail enterprise on.
- beams_of_light 8y agoThis is puzzling, as Google pushed Inbox pretty hard. I was under the impression that the Gmail interface would be decommissioned, and Inbox would be the future.
- village-idiot 8y agoSeems like the left hand and the right hand are fighting.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoThey took a lot of the features from Inbox and added them to GMail, so I think it (kind of) is.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoIf you've worked in large orgs it makes sense. They had a strategic priority a while back to 'make mail good on mobile' ... whereas now they are folding it all back into the gmail umbrella because the overall strategic impetus would be to be gmail founded. So, short term strategy now important with the longer term issues of product portfolio. Collapse the 'good bits' of inbox into Gmail and move forward. You have to consider it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have two email products at the same time. The real problem is the new Gmail is not very good. It still blows my mind how companies with billions of dollars to burn get UI wrong. Like the first Windows 10.
- Aeolun 8y agoThe problem is, in companies with billions to burn the design is largely decided upon by people that have no business doing any design.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoI know of a 'top Brazilian designer' who was hired by Google and then quit because they just didn't get it. I can actually see a shade of rationality in 'metrics driven design' i.e. 'picking the colour blue' on the web page. Small change in hue = difference. But beyond that - you need to trust your designers. If they are set up with the right philosophy and don't let their aesthetic aspirations get out of hand ... you need them.
- everdev 8y agoI'll miss reminders the most because I use my mail client as my ToDo lost as well. I switched to Gmail preemptively and I'm back to writing emails to myself again...
- procinct 8y agoI’m pretty sure the new Gmail has a todo list built into it called Tasks. Could be only with Gsuite though.
- avip 8y agoYep notes and tasks are part of Gmail's new look (hiding on the right navbar).
- 1123581321 8y agoIt does, but it’s a separate list to the right of email. It’s easy to forget about it. The way Inbox made tasks no different than email was something special. Hit T, type the task out, enter, and it’s now impossible to ignore.
- city41 8y agoGmail’s tasks are inferior to Inbox’s reminders. For one they don’t have recurring tasks. The ease of creating a reminder and snoozing it just like an email was killer. Of the hundreds of todo apps made over the decades, Inbox finally nailed it. I’ll greatly miss Inbox.
- patrickdavey 8y agoGoogle tasks?! Never heard of it, thought it was another name for Google keep (which i have used). Irritating that it's not built into the Gmail app. I'm really going to miss inbox :(
- maym86 8y agoThis. My inbox is a to-do list for things I need to act on. Anything else gets snoozed until it needs to be done. Having non-email to-do items here too worked so well for me. Having to move back to a separate to-do list will be a pain. If they could just add this I'll happily return to Gmail.
- omosubi 8y agoI used to be a Google fan boy but am starting to dislike them more and more. This, they killed off reader and the creepy data collection they do is why I've started to look into alternatives for their products - anyone have any good suggestions?
- rootusrootus 8y agoI feel the same way. I used to like most all of their offerings and I considered them [as a company] pretty benign. But over time I am less impressed by both their product offerings and their ethos.
- jgtrosh 8y agoThere's a variety of “de-googlifying” services provided by https://www.framasoft.org https://www.framasoft.org you might be interested in
- bklaasen 8y agoThanks for this. They've come up on my radar a few times. I'd love to hear from anyone here who uses these services.
- codyb 8y agoI use Fastmail (paid) for email with my domain name. It's alright, the app works well enough on iOS. No complaints so far really. Then DuckDuckGo for search. You can use !g to switch to google search but I rarely do anymore. Then Weblock and uBlock origin as ad blockers for phone and desktop respectively to prevent some data harvesting. And I only browse in incognito, I just log in everytime I need to use something. Then Apple Maps to replace maps. I do still have a gmail account so no quite totally off google. And Apple Maps has gotten a lot better over time but is undeniably the worse product of the two. But it works well enough.
- bogomipz 8y agoCould you say what does Weblock provide that uBlock doesn't? I looked at their FAQ and it wasn't obvious to me. Thanks.
- uluyol 8y agoThe death of reader wasn't as bad as this for me. Soon after reader died, alternatives popped up left and right, and some of them are better than reader ever was. What alternative is there to gmail/inbox? Unlike an RSS reader, I think it's much more difficult to make an email service that's close to being as good as gmail/inbox while having the same level of features, especially across platforms.
- cordite 8y agoSure, alternatives popped up, but wit the friction of finding something free and reliable, in my case at least, it resulted in abandoning my rss sources.
- pixelrevision 8y agoI’m with you. Inbox is really nice and mailbox has been killed by Dropbox. The new gmail just isn’t the same thing.
- jdhendrickson 8y agoWhat do you consider better than reader was? I'm still looking for something that scratches that itch in the same way so I'd really like to hear your opinion.
- Inthenameofmine 8y agoInoreader is a very good alternative now imo. It lacks the way to share and subscribe to other people's shared articles, but i'd still give it a 9/10. On that note, it boggles my mind that no startup has simply coppied google reader's features yet.
- cxseven 8y agoThe problem is that the death of Reader also inflicted a death blow to blogs in general. Aggregation was entirely forfeited to Facebook, and clickbait became the norm for driving eyeballs, not fascinating writing that Readers shared and loved. Also, "sort by magic" provided an excellent feed of articles to me in Reader, and all of the alternatives I tried either didn't have a comparable algorithm or their userbase was too small to train it.
- foobaw 8y agoJust a side note but if you dig around, you'll realize that a lot of Googlers left the Inbox team around 2016. There isn't much competition to email. It's likely that other products were prioritized (like ARCore) due to competition from Apple, etc.
- Zigurd 8y agoI use Inbox for all my mail. I'm fine with Inbox being EOL'ed because the migration is effortless and only relatively minor features remain in limbo. My least favorite thing about Inbox was the low-density UI. I want side-bars. I want to be able to have a high-density list view. Inbox never integrated my hangouts transcripts. I'm fine with going back to a much-evolved GMail.
- andybak 8y agoInbox has a couple of unique and valuable features that exists in no other clients. Sadly the ones I depend on the most.
- djaychela 8y agoI use and like inbox, mostly because I took straight away to using the snooze function - the best thing I've found in an email client, full stop. While this can apparently be done in Gmail now, I'd like to look for an alternative at this point - paid - to move from Google. Any suggestions for an email client that has decent android support, and offers a snooze function?
- frankydp 8y agoGmail has snooze. With the settings to customize your swipe in each direction.
- djaychela 8y agoNice, thanks for the tip on the swipe which makes the Gmail app much more usable for me.
- pixelrevision 8y agoOutlook has snooze.
- sorenjan 8y agoI never bothered with Inbox because I figured Google would cancel it some day. I understands user's disappointment, but it can't be a surprise. This is what Google does. It's amazing to me that a company with close to 90 000 employees and that attracts top talent can't find a way to support their services longer than a few years. How much does a handfull of indian engineers and space in their own datacenter cost?
- nodelessness 8y agoAre Indian engineers your favourite coolies that will do the dirty work of keeping your systems running after you've lost interest in them ?
- sorenjan 8y agoIsn't that were US companies are outsourcing to? Why would Google use expensive Silicon Valley-engineers to do bugfixes on a product they'd rather cancel? Are you denying there's a price difference?
- mbrumlow 8y agoI can tell you that I am going through the experience for the 3rd time now of my entire team being let go in favor for engineers in India. So far it seems to be like this. 1) Have a big spin up in the US. Create a new product in 1 year or less. 2) Stabilize the product over the 2nd year. 3) Slowly lay off US engineers and support teams in favor for guys in India. Don't get me wrong, I have no issue with Indian engineers. The problem seems to be management cares about headcount and not quality. It would be one thing if we were being replaced by better engineers, but that is not the case.
- amaccuish 8y agoI was with you up until "handfull of indian engineers". No need.
- enobrev 8y agoThat about sums it up for me. Unsurprised disappointment. Was great to have it. I'll miss it. I hope someone picks up where they left off. I'm unsure whether I'll be willing to pay for it if someone does. Gmail is still fairly incredible overall, but it's simply par now rather than the revelation it once was.
- ryan-allen 8y agoThe upside is that, now some smart cookie can make a web app that 'reinvents the inbox' and sell it to Google for millions. Time is of the essence!
- wybiral 8y agoI don't even try to understand Google anymore. They released "Hangouts Chat" not to be confused with Google Hangouts, which is not to be confused with their Allo, Duo, Voice, or Messenger apps. On the upside, they shut down Google Spaces and replaced Gmail Chat with Google Hangouts (not Hangouts Chat, that's different) and now they've canned Inbox and are keeping the Gmail app. Huh?
- lunchables 8y agoAnd if we can't follow this, imagine the average consumer. I can't even imagine how much more successful Google could be if they could cure their insane A.D.D. problem.
- wetpaws 8y agoAnd let's not forget they killed Google talk which worked perfectly and is what we all should've use now
- ponco 8y agorip inbox
- tluyben2 8y agoIf they would only open source it... At least then someone can hack away on it.
- ronnier 8y agoGoogle Inbox did one evil thing. To delete an item in iOS's Inbox, you swipe left to right, whereas pretty much every other app in iOS you swipe right to left. This has thrown me into such confusion now in all apps that I'm happy to see Inbox go away.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoWhy did you use Inbox if you're happier without it?
- ronnier 8y agoIt easier to keep my work account separate from my personal by using two apps (the majority of my work uses Inbox as well so I like to keep on the same).
- frankydp 8y agoYou can customize each direction of swipe in the Gmail app.
- mcintyre1994 8y agoHow do you do that? Just opened Gmail for the first time in ages and it has both swipes to archive as default.. which is stupid.
- PakG1 8y agoSeems I should apologize for being one of those gmail people who never ever tried out Inbox. :) Sorry, everyone.
- shanev 8y agoMy favorite feature of Inbox was the organization of Trips. Thankfully there's still TripIt.
- village-idiot 8y agoWhen’s the last time Google has to even pretend to give a shit about the end user?
- village-idiot 8y agoBefore you all dismiss this idea, remember google reader? Super popular, super dead.
- Gatsky 8y agoThere is always so much vitriol on HN about these kinds of announcements. I've never understood why. Google presumably has lots of data and feedback from people using Inbox, and determined that it wasn't useful enough or widespread enough to justify ongoing investment. Why is this surprising or shocking? This happens all the time in commercial and open source software. The internet is great, but unfortunately has the ability to agglomerate individual moments of otherwise transient irritation into a pyroclastic flow of outrage.
- sharmi 8y agoIn the case of open source project, * if the maintainer is no longer able to take the project further, the code is still there an can be used as is, maybe with a few bugfixes. (ala, thunderbird). The code does not disappear overnight. r. * All the associated data is still yours and available. So no information is lost. * If it is very critical, you can develop it yourself further I am not an user of Inbox, but I can understand the outrage. When a service is offered for free by such a mammoth of a company, it gives a false sense of security and permanence. It crushes most competition and development of open source alternatives. Then one fine day, the rug is pulled from under your feet and there is no recourse. The most ironic aspect is you no longer have access to your pinned emails, bundles and such. Yet, somewhere in google's distributed data storage, it will continue to reside for a long long time. The information asymmetry is outrageous.
- cbcoutinho 8y agoThe 'bundles' and pinned emails are not lost - they are all just 'labels' under the hood, and they can be found back in gmail as well (except for a couple, I think travel doesn't carry over)
- giancarlostoro 8y agoYou bring up a good point, it seems as though the answer is to invest more into open source mail clients that can offer more since there truly is value in an improved mail UI.
- shaklee3 8y ago
- skybrian 8y agoMeanwhile in a different topic, people are criticizing Google for the confusion of having way too many chat services. I think in the end, Google doesn't want more than one email service. If Inbox showed enough growth to someday replace Gmail, it might have had a chance.
- canistr 8y agoThe part that gets me the most about killing Inbox and forcing users to go back to Gmail is the accumulation of Pinned emails. I was happy to oblige to using pins when I transitioned from Gmail -> Inbox. Stars were replaced with pins but there is no direct mapping. But now that Inbox is dead, the years of pinned emails are effectively useless when they should've been starred in Gmail. It's a frustrating experience for users especially when this is not the first time for Google. This is why as an Android Developer, I'm in the majority community opinion believing that Dart/Flutter/Fuschia shouldn't be trusted. These products/dev tools are going to be in perpetual beta and not worth taking the risk of going to prod with.
- romed 8y agoI think people are overlooking the big picture here. Inbox had a lot of machine learning features that Gmail lacked, like Smart Reply. I think this was just because they really couldn't afford to run Smart Reply on all the incoming email. Now they can, so Gmail has gained Smart Reply and they no longer need to partition that out for cost reasons. While Gmail still lacks some of the other email intelligence features that I will miss, like the Trips bundle, I have a feeling they will emerge in Gmail shortly.
- dmourati 8y agoI don't agree with the conclusion that passionate users are going to take their passion elsewhere. This feels like more of an idle threat by a scorned user.
- Apaec 8y agoIf you want to be passionate about a piece of software, make sure it's OSS.
- zavi 8y agoThis is overblown, people's livelihoods don't rely on Inbox. Most features are in Gmail now anyways. And no whataboutism please, this deprecarion event is about Inbox, not some other product.
- cwyers 8y agoI'm up for a good Google hate as much as anyone (man alive, I could give a good rant on how they seem to be trying to screw up in the chat space), but is there any evidence that Inbox users are more passionate than the top N Gmail users when sorting on the passion index, where N = the number of Inbox users (and a likely small fraction of total Gmail users)? I highly doubt it.
- dmix 8y ago> A radically analytical approach is powerful, but it can blind you to the factors that cannot be measured. Factors such as user passion. This is not true. You can still align KPIs to stuff like that... The problem is looking at 'vanity metrics' or one-size-fits-all metrics like pure user growth, without proper segmentation of high-value and high-engagement users. Or worse marketing/positioning failing to pull its weight and blaming the product. Or giving it a half-hearted attempt, limited resource/talent-wise, and then comparing the results 1-to-1 with other successful products which were heavily prioritized. There's plenty of opportunity to miss the boat. Aligning metrics with business goals is a dynamic process, not one-size-fits-all, which is lost on many business in the big data world.
- twblalock 8y agoI don't see an endgame that wouldn't have resulted in outrage. I doubt Google would be committed to keeping both Gmail and Inbox around forever. Either Gmail would be merged into Inbox, or Inbox features would be merged into Gmail. Both of those choices would outrage a large group of users. Frankly it seems that getting rid of Inbox involves pissing off far fewer people than getting rid of Gmail.
- sseth 8y agoThose (like me) who like using Google products know the bargain. Until a product reaches critical mass, it could get canceled. Wave died. G Suite has succeeded. Chrome succeeded. Reader died. Google+ is in a coma. Hangouts and Google Photos which came out of the ashes looks like they will stay, though what they are doing with their chat tools is a real mystery. In hardware, Chromecast succeeded, Nexus faded away as did a bunch of other stuff. Among the ones i am a little worried about : Google Keep - which i am using more and more. I hope it does not die. Also, Google wifi which i am using now - hope it stays. I tried Inbox and liked it, but I did not invest a lot in it. The ones you can be certain won't go away are the ones with a billion+ users : Gmail, Android, Chrome, Maps, Search, Youtube, Google Drive (almost 1B) and Google Photos (500M+) should be fine as well. But Google does not owe me anything. And I don't owe them. I don't have to use any of their products if I don't want to.
- Heliosmaster 8y agoI see in these comments a lot of bitterness, where I think there should be opportunity: if you think Google made a mistake in killing Inbox and it was a feature beloved by many users.. why don't you spin up your version of it? They have already done the hard part for you: the idea. When google killed greader, Feedly, The old Reader and other products rose up to the challenge. They felt there was market, and they launched (or just changed and marketed better) their product. What is stopping you from doing the same now?
- njarboe 8y agoI believe that the hacker news general attitude is correct that the idea is not the hard part. The hard part is execution and getting adoption. Inbox works and is use by many. Hundreds of functional imitations can/will die, even when readily available on github.
- skinnymuch 8y agoI thought it’s the opposite. Idea isn’t the hard part. I’ve never seen ideas being said as the hard part.
- jaimex2 8y agoUgh, anyone remember the Latitude crap fest? Between dead, Google Plus and only available on Android.
- loomhigh223555 8y agoI use google plus...I only saw this because it is on my Google Alert. What is this latitude crap fest?
- tzury 8y agoI am convinced that in the roadmap of Gmail, the greatness of Inbox is planned to be integrated. This is my opinion only, and time will tell how wrong or right I am. There are 2 Types of Gmail users, gmail.com and G Suite. I think Google prefer maintaining two types of backends, rather than two types of front-ends.
- yanneves 8y agoAnyone got a Superhuman invite?
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago'we can take away as easily as we give'
- m3kw9 8y agoEventually I failed to see much difference if Inbox and GMail app. I just deleted Inbox because it seemed redundant. Gmail isn’t that good either with their auto categories. I always have to go thru multiple folders to find mail that I was expecting and arrived, never rally know which folder they’ve put it. Is like your mom came into your room and cleaned it but she misplaced stuff and you’d have to find it.
- rsynnott 8y agoI didn’t personally care for Inbox anyway, but after the Reader debacle, I avoid becoming dependent on any new Google product.
- qalmakka 8y agoI've only used Inbox since the very first day it was released, and I loved it; it's a simple mix of concepts that resulted in an experience that has made mail much more pleasant (and less of a hassle) to me. I don't think anyone that has intensively used Inbox in the last years may think even remotely that the new Gmail is a similar experience, because it definitely still has a completely different look and feel. I think I'll switch back to Thunderbird on desktop for the time being, given that the hassle (and delays) of having several POP3 accounts configured on the Gmail website isn't really worth the effort without Inbox.
- smtpserver 8y agoDoes this mean that the app itself will stop working or just stops getting updates?
- beanboot 8y agoIm wondering this myself. I hope its the former.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tyrex2017 8y agothey will kill anything that 99% of their users dont care for. it would be insane not to. it is strange for us people because we know 1000s who care for those products/features
- maym86 8y agoIf they'd just implement the reminders and grouping features in Gmail I'd be fine with this. I don't particularly care about how the UI looks. I use snoozed reminders so much and being able to unclutter my inbox with groups makes a huge difference. Doesn't seem like it would be hard to optionally include them in Gmail. Without them moving back to Gmail feels like a step backwards.
- nkkollaw 8y agoI agree, although I doubt they care. I also tried to switch to Gmail in preparation, and it's a lot worse IMO.
- aussieguy1234 8y agoToday's startup idea: Build a new Inbox