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For me the main ones are Map, GMail and Drive/Docs. I'm all-in on MacOS and iOS and have been for over a decade, but those three apps/services are essential for

by simonh 5y ago

For me the main ones are Map, GMail and Drive/Docs. I'm all-in on MacOS and iOS and have been for over a decade, but those three apps/services are essential for me. Search obviously, I tried DDG but it's not quite there for me. I tried Brave a few months ago but it was glitchy and unstable, on MacOS at least. I could probably move to a different email service, but the rest of my family are on GMail and I don't see a strong reason to move.

robin_reala 5y ago
Why would family be a lock-in factor for GMail? It’s just email.
- gonehome 5y ago
  Takes an entire day to migrate accounts from online services and apps. The flow for this is very bad, on some sites you have to email support and on others it’s impossible. Even after doing this a year later I still get email to my old account (Uber) even though I’ve updated my email. Some sites you can’t update and there is no support (Stanford medical).
- h4waii 5y ago
  If you admin a Google Apps account on your own domain, with family/friends on it, they have to suffer if you want to migrate away.
Joeri 5y ago
DDG for me is 90%, so I use DDG and append !g whenever I don’t get the results I’m looking for. I’d rather have google search as a choice than a default.
Nextgrid 5y ago
Why use the GMail app over the built-in client?
- redman25 5y ago
  Not the poster but I use it because Mail didn’t support notifications. I’m not sure if that’s still true. A lot of Gmail specific features tend to work better with their app.
- ftio 5y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Google. Opinions my own. I love Gmail. I've also been an iOS user since day one, and 99% of the time I prefer apps that feel like iOS apps. I use the Gmail app instead of Mail, even for my personal email, because Gmail has a number of concepts and integrations with other parts of Workspace that don't neatly jibe with the native Mail app. iOS wants to treat labels as folders, which is an approximation. Responding to Calendar events isn't the one-tap, in-place experience it is in Gmail. The Gmail app also does a few key things a lot better: search is way more sophisticated and reliable; Smart Compose is really brilliant and makes me faster, particularly at knocking out more 'trivial' emails. The one thing I really miss about iOS mail that Gmail doesn't support is VIP contacts. Gmail has a way of marking emails as 'high priority' and only notifying on those, but its classifier doesn't really match my expectations. As a result, I've just turned off notifications for email. I check it a few times a day. Probably healthier, but esp when I'm waiting for an email from a critical contact, VIP would be awesome.

by simonh 5y ago

robin_reala 5y ago

Why would family be a lock-in factor for GMail? It’s just email.

gonehome 5y ago
Takes an entire day to migrate accounts from online services and apps. The flow for this is very bad, on some sites you have to email support and on others it’s impossible. Even after doing this a year later I still get email to my old account (Uber) even though I’ve updated my email. Some sites you can’t update and there is no support (Stanford medical).
h4waii 5y ago
If you admin a Google Apps account on your own domain, with family/friends on it, they have to suffer if you want to migrate away.

Joeri 5y ago

DDG for me is 90%, so I use DDG and append !g whenever I don’t get the results I’m looking for. I’d rather have google search as a choice than a default.

Nextgrid 5y ago

Why use the GMail app over the built-in client?

redman25 5y ago
Not the poster but I use it because Mail didn’t support notifications. I’m not sure if that’s still true. A lot of Gmail specific features tend to work better with their app.
ftio 5y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Google. Opinions my own. I love Gmail. I've also been an iOS user since day one, and 99% of the time I prefer apps that feel like iOS apps. I use the Gmail app instead of Mail, even for my personal email, because Gmail has a number of concepts and integrations with other parts of Workspace that don't neatly jibe with the native Mail app. iOS wants to treat labels as folders, which is an approximation. Responding to Calendar events isn't the one-tap, in-place experience it is in Gmail. The Gmail app also does a few key things a lot better: search is way more sophisticated and reliable; Smart Compose is really brilliant and makes me faster, particularly at knocking out more 'trivial' emails. The one thing I really miss about iOS mail that Gmail doesn't support is VIP contacts. Gmail has a way of marking emails as 'high priority' and only notifying on those, but its classifier doesn't really match my expectations. As a result, I've just turned off notifications for email. I check it a few times a day. Probably healthier, but esp when I'm waiting for an email from a critical contact, VIP would be awesome.