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An actual example of this lives in the Gmail iOS app. Click a link in an email and every x days, a sheet appears: https://imgur.com/a/nlGS4Yk https://imgur.com/

An actual example of this lives in the Gmail iOS app. Click a link in an email and every x days, a sheet appears: https://imgur.com/a/nlGS4Yk https://imgur.com/a/nlGS4Yk 1. Chrome 2. Google 3. Default browser app (w/unfamiliar generic logo) They removed the option for Safari some time in the last two years; here's how it looked in 2024: https://imgur.com/1iBVFfc https://imgur.com/1iBVFfc And the cherry on top of dark UX patterns: an unchecked toggle rests at the bottom. "Ask me which app to use every time." You cannot stop getting these.

kowbell 7mo ago
I was so mad when they removed the fourth option. I can't remember which one was which, but one meant "open in a webview inside this app" and the other was "open in a new tab in your default browser". It was still terrible UX but I liked at least having that choice.
vachina 7mo ago
Why are you even using the Gmail as your mail app?
- al_borland 7mo ago
  The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from. On top of that, since Google does their own thing, it doesn’t fit well into standard IMAP that most clients use. Sparrow made Gmail a great experience, but Google bought it and shut it down. I’m still rather bitter about that. It’s the only email client that actually made me enjoy email.
  - asutekku 7mo ago
    Spark is a good replacement for Sparrow.
    - al_borland 7mo ago
      I just checked out a video. I don’t think it’ll do it for me. What I liked about Sparrow is it made email feel more like Messages or Twitter. Going back and forth in email didn’t feel so formal. I didn’t see that in Spark. They also seem to be leaning really hard into AI, which is a bit of a turn off.
  - ninjagoo 7mo ago
    > The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from. Not that hard. Get new email, autoforward old email to new. In old email, set reply-to as new email. After suitable time has elapsed, disable old email.
    - hallway_monitor 7mo ago
      I hate to say it but you are right. It might be finally time to cut the gcord
    - al_borland 7mo ago
      This doesn’t solve the root of the problem. Google is still the backbone of a significant amount of the email and no meaningful progress would be made toward the day when I could delete the Google account. It would require systematically changing my email at the 300+ sites I’m aware of, assuming they allow that, or deleting the account if they allow that. I’ve been making efforts here and it’s painful. Many companies don’t have good systems for that, if any at all. Even big companies like Amazon and Sony, I was told to just abandon old accounts and let them hang out there forever… I had duplicate Audible and PlayStation accounts. No way to delete them. I found this particularly upsetting with Sony, considering how many times they’ve been hacked. On some sites I also ended up in captcha purgatory. Then there are the hundreds more who have my email somewhere. I tied to change my email 13 years ago. My own mother still sends to my old gmail account. I think she used the new one a few times, but do I really want to nag my 70 year old mother about using the wrong address? My dad is the only one who reliably uses it, because he uses his contacts app properly. Over a decade and the progress has been almost non-existent. All this effort did was make email and logins harder to manage by spreading it out. The pragmatic approach is to go back to Gmail, since most stuff is still there. I don’t want to be in bed with Google, but at least it’s only one thing to think about. Thinking about it, my Gmail account is also my Apple ID. I think Apple only recently made an option available to change that, but it feels risky.
      - ribosometronome 7mo ago
        I changed my Amazon sign in a few weeks back, no real issue. I just popped over to Audible and there seems to be a pretty straight forward flow to changing your email, although I didn’t actually try it out. What issue did you have? Was it awhile back? Not trying to be contentious but curious / you may have some luck now if you struggled with it in the past. It’s certainly not trivial to just abandon one email for another, especially if you have been using the same for two decades.
  - komali2 7mo ago
    I've not had issues plugging Gmail into Thunderbird, aquamail, k-9 mail, maybe you could try one of those?
    - al_borland 7mo ago
      The issues I had (granted this was probably a decade ago), was that Gmail uses tags and IMAP uses folders. The translation there always felt messy and cumbersome. To me, this is why I felt Gmail wasn’t good in generic mail clients and really needed one built for Gmail. Maybe all those apps have since updated to natively support all Gmail’s features, but that is also a cat and mouse game with all the stuff they try that doesn’t fit neatly into established mail protocols.
      - isaachinman 7mo ago
        I can confirm that basically all third-party apps have to handle this "Gmail weirdness" and come up with an abstraction layer to make Gmail IMAP accounts play nicely with "regular" IMAP accounts.
  - wafflemaker 7mo ago
    >The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible You can use mobile Thunderbird with a Gmail account.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - g947o 7mo ago
    It's possible and I migrated almost all my emails from Outlook and Gmail. That's two services. I still have those accounts and occasionally check for emails from old contacts or service emails, but on a daily basis I don't interact with Gmail at all.
  - tiberious726 7mo ago
    I still use emacs gnus with Gmail. You need a token instead of old fashioned imap auth, but it works fine
al_borland 7mo ago
I hate this pop-up so much. I don’t even have Chrome installed on my phone. How about open up on the only browser I have installed… This kind of thing should be illegal. The default browser is the default for a reason, to avoid this kind of stuff. I think I’ve reported this as a bug to Google a couple times, in a couple different apps… as they do it in their other apps too. The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now. How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting? Google really has made the internet and worse place in so many ways.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- paulddraper 7mo ago
  > not spam it on every website just for visiting? It's the website that spamming that. Either via google.accounts.id.prompt(), or options provided to loaded Google scripts. Google is guilty only insofar as that feature is possible.
  - harry8 7mo ago
    Google is guilty
    - hilbert42 7mo ago
      Trouble is we cognoscenti know it but the great unwashed do not and or don't give a damn about the fact. Google and all of Big Tech well know of our objections but unfortunately we are only hardly perceptible noise to be ignored on their way to even greater profits.
  - al_borland 7mo ago
    There is no way this many sites did it organically without Google pushing it in some way, not to mention they built the thing in the first place (as you mentioned). There also doesn’t seem to be any way to disable it (other than maybe an extension that I saw recently, but at $15 I needed to think about how much I want to spend just because Google is obnoxious). I’m sure the real goal of this “feature” is to get people to sign-up for the site without them actually realizing they are signing up. They click OK just so the modal goes away and now the site has their email address. They can use that growing email list to seek higher prices from sponsors when they put an add in their newsletter the user will now be spammed with. Imagine if the other auth providers followed suit. Open a news article and you need to close the Google auth, Apple auth, Facebook auth, Microsoft auth, GutHub auth, X auth… I’m sure I’m forgetting some. After closing those 6 modals, reject the cookie prompt, close the newsletter modal, and maybe now we can start reading the article if there is an auto-playing video ad covering some of the content. All of this is really pushing me away from the internet in general and souring me on the tech industry as a whole. I’m at that point where I find myself casually browsing for jobs that won’t require I ever touch a computer again.
notyourwork 7mo ago
Gatekeepers have to gatekeeper. Sigh.
pea 7mo ago
The darkest UX pattern I have ever hit is trying to cancel Google Workspace; whereby they disable the scrollbar on the page so you cannot actually get to the cancel button.
- OhioMan2943 7mo ago
  Welcome to the future :)
- pzo 7mo ago
  one time had cancel Google Colabs and really I couldn't figure out have to yell at them in support ticket to remove my subscription (eventually they did)
- frizlab 7mo ago
  Oh yes, I have had that! I tried disabling workspace for my brother-in-law through screen sharing and I thought it was a screen sharing issue. I successfully did it on my own computer but I’m glad to learn this was probably on purpose. I’m not crazy!
- Macha 7mo ago
  I get this on cookie consent modals too
- shafyy 7mo ago
  Yes, I want through this last year and documented it in a screencast. This is how it looks https://mstdn.social/@can/115243851196253381 https://mstdn.social/@can/115243851196253381 How is this legal?
  - hrimfaxi 7mo ago
    It's probably not but no one has challenged them on it.
  - ddalex 7mo ago
    Don't assign to malice what can be explained by incompetence: * new automated UX experiments starts * the UI bot made a change that made the page unscrollable * the experiment has a much higher rate of retention then the control (because people can't scroll) * the experiment is deemed a success by results analysis (no one looks at the page to see WHY) * the experiment is blessed as the new pipeline Such an obvious business improvement made by Gemini !
kdheiwns 7mo ago
An annoying extension of this is opening a Google maps link on mobile. It always prompts to open Google Maps (the app) no matter what. If you click no, its bugs the fuck out and opens an App Store link. If you click yes, even if you have Google Maps installed, it bugs the fuck out and opens an app store link. In neither case will it properly show the location on a first attempt. It's been like this for years. I'd ask what they're thinking when they came up with this, but I remain unconvinced that any such activity happens inside any Google offices today.
- smelendez 7mo ago
  I think this is an Apple bug. I’ve seen it with non-Google apps too. I’m not sure what causes it, but I believe sometimes you can long tap the link and select the correct option. I believe the behavior where you say no and it still tries to open the app is because the default behavior on Google Maps links is to open Google Maps.
  - duskdozer 7mo ago
    This happens to me now on Android. It either wants to download google maps or if I try to open in browser, it just repeatedly refresh loops before drawing anything. But not always possible it seems to get the address by inspecting the link
hutattedonmyarm 7mo ago
the YouTube app does the same. Infuriating. I don't have Chrome installed and it doesn't list the only third party browser I _do_ have installed: Orion
froddd 7mo ago
I’m in the UK and use the Gmail app, I don’t ever see this sheet. Is this US-only? I don’t see the sheet for imgur.com either because, well, they’ve blocked access completely for UK users. :shrug:
- tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
  I see it in the UK.
  - froddd 7mo ago
    The app settings offer a way to set default browser to the system default (which is what I have selected), as well as a toggle to “Ask me every time” — I have this turned off and never see the pop-up. EDIT: also just tested turning this checkbox off. I then clicked a link in an email, got the pop-up, unchecked “ask me every time”, clicked default browser, and didn’t see the pop-up next time.
    - swiftcoder 7mo ago
      Don’t worry, it’ll come back in a couple of months. Not sure if has a timeout, or if it gets reset by app updates, but that checkbox is only sticky enough to gaslight you into thinking it works
iqandjoke 7mo ago
If you use iPhone, you can use iOS Mail app (and with iCloud mail) if you really care. Apple dark UX pattern is that there always has badges on Settings app if you do not subscribe to iCloud even if you have manual backup. You cannot dismiss it.
- tengwar2 7mo ago
  I don't subscribe to iCloud, and have never seen these. Where do you see them?
- Daedren 7mo ago
  They keep enshittifying the experience for those not using iCloud Mail. They just removed the feature to use alternate email aliases on non-iCloud accounts on iOS 26.
- iamcalledrob 7mo ago
  This has tripped up non-technical family members who ask for help and aren't sure if they are required to pay for these things. "What is Arcade, am I supposed to be paying for it?" Sigh. Apple used to be better than this.
pftburger 7mo ago
I love the irony that the Imgur link asks you to install the Imgur app first
irae 7mo ago
I don't understand why people don't use alternative mail clients to avoid that? Is the Gmail app the only one that is good enough? If so, and if it is essential to you, just go with the bundle (Gmail, Chrome, etc). (FWIW, I left gmail entirely, I pay for my email provider)
babypuncher 7mo ago
This would drive me insane! I'm glad I ditched Gmail altogether.
aboardRat4 7mo ago
Please don't use imgur, it blocks off half of the internet. Use catbox.moe or imageban

kowbell 7mo ago

I was so mad when they removed the fourth option. I can't remember which one was which, but one meant "open in a webview inside this app" and the other was "open in a new tab in your default browser". It was still terrible UX but I liked at least having that choice.

vachina 7mo ago

Why are you even using the Gmail as your mail app?

al_borland 7mo ago
The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from. On top of that, since Google does their own thing, it doesn’t fit well into standard IMAP that most clients use. Sparrow made Gmail a great experience, but Google bought it and shut it down. I’m still rather bitter about that. It’s the only email client that actually made me enjoy email.
- asutekku 7mo ago
  Spark is a good replacement for Sparrow.
  - al_borland 7mo ago
    I just checked out a video. I don’t think it’ll do it for me. What I liked about Sparrow is it made email feel more like Messages or Twitter. Going back and forth in email didn’t feel so formal. I didn’t see that in Spark. They also seem to be leaning really hard into AI, which is a bit of a turn off.
- ninjagoo 7mo ago
  > The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible to totally migrate away from. Not that hard. Get new email, autoforward old email to new. In old email, set reply-to as new email. After suitable time has elapsed, disable old email.
  - hallway_monitor 7mo ago
    I hate to say it but you are right. It might be finally time to cut the gcord
  - al_borland 7mo ago
    This doesn’t solve the root of the problem. Google is still the backbone of a significant amount of the email and no meaningful progress would be made toward the day when I could delete the Google account. It would require systematically changing my email at the 300+ sites I’m aware of, assuming they allow that, or deleting the account if they allow that. I’ve been making efforts here and it’s painful. Many companies don’t have good systems for that, if any at all. Even big companies like Amazon and Sony, I was told to just abandon old accounts and let them hang out there forever… I had duplicate Audible and PlayStation accounts. No way to delete them. I found this particularly upsetting with Sony, considering how many times they’ve been hacked. On some sites I also ended up in captcha purgatory. Then there are the hundreds more who have my email somewhere. I tied to change my email 13 years ago. My own mother still sends to my old gmail account. I think she used the new one a few times, but do I really want to nag my 70 year old mother about using the wrong address? My dad is the only one who reliably uses it, because he uses his contacts app properly. Over a decade and the progress has been almost non-existent. All this effort did was make email and logins harder to manage by spreading it out. The pragmatic approach is to go back to Gmail, since most stuff is still there. I don’t want to be in bed with Google, but at least it’s only one thing to think about. Thinking about it, my Gmail account is also my Apple ID. I think Apple only recently made an option available to change that, but it feels risky.
    - ribosometronome 7mo ago
      I changed my Amazon sign in a few weeks back, no real issue. I just popped over to Audible and there seems to be a pretty straight forward flow to changing your email, although I didn’t actually try it out. What issue did you have? Was it awhile back? Not trying to be contentious but curious / you may have some luck now if you struggled with it in the past. It’s certainly not trivial to just abandon one email for another, especially if you have been using the same for two decades.
- komali2 7mo ago
  I've not had issues plugging Gmail into Thunderbird, aquamail, k-9 mail, maybe you could try one of those?
  - al_borland 7mo ago
    The issues I had (granted this was probably a decade ago), was that Gmail uses tags and IMAP uses folders. The translation there always felt messy and cumbersome. To me, this is why I felt Gmail wasn’t good in generic mail clients and really needed one built for Gmail. Maybe all those apps have since updated to natively support all Gmail’s features, but that is also a cat and mouse game with all the stuff they try that doesn’t fit neatly into established mail protocols.
    - isaachinman 7mo ago
      I can confirm that basically all third-party apps have to handle this "Gmail weirdness" and come up with an abstraction layer to make Gmail IMAP accounts play nicely with "regular" IMAP accounts.
- wafflemaker 7mo ago
  >The switching cost on a 20+ year old email address is high. It’s basically impossible You can use mobile Thunderbird with a Gmail account.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- g947o 7mo ago
  It's possible and I migrated almost all my emails from Outlook and Gmail. That's two services. I still have those accounts and occasionally check for emails from old contacts or service emails, but on a daily basis I don't interact with Gmail at all.
- tiberious726 7mo ago
  I still use emacs gnus with Gmail. You need a token instead of old fashioned imap auth, but it works fine

al_borland 7mo ago

I hate this pop-up so much. I don’t even have Chrome installed on my phone. How about open up on the only browser I have installed… This kind of thing should be illegal. The default browser is the default for a reason, to avoid this kind of stuff. I think I’ve reported this as a bug to Google a couple times, in a couple different apps… as they do it in their other apps too. The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now. How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting? Google really has made the internet and worse place in so many ways.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
paulddraper 7mo ago
> not spam it on every website just for visiting? It's the website that spamming that. Either via google.accounts.id.prompt(), or options provided to loaded Google scripts. Google is guilty only insofar as that feature is possible.
- harry8 7mo ago
  Google is guilty
  - hilbert42 7mo ago
    Trouble is we cognoscenti know it but the great unwashed do not and or don't give a damn about the fact. Google and all of Big Tech well know of our objections but unfortunately we are only hardly perceptible noise to be ignored on their way to even greater profits.
- al_borland 7mo ago
  There is no way this many sites did it organically without Google pushing it in some way, not to mention they built the thing in the first place (as you mentioned). There also doesn’t seem to be any way to disable it (other than maybe an extension that I saw recently, but at $15 I needed to think about how much I want to spend just because Google is obnoxious). I’m sure the real goal of this “feature” is to get people to sign-up for the site without them actually realizing they are signing up. They click OK just so the modal goes away and now the site has their email address. They can use that growing email list to seek higher prices from sponsors when they put an add in their newsletter the user will now be spammed with. Imagine if the other auth providers followed suit. Open a news article and you need to close the Google auth, Apple auth, Facebook auth, Microsoft auth, GutHub auth, X auth… I’m sure I’m forgetting some. After closing those 6 modals, reject the cookie prompt, close the newsletter modal, and maybe now we can start reading the article if there is an auto-playing video ad covering some of the content. All of this is really pushing me away from the internet in general and souring me on the tech industry as a whole. I’m at that point where I find myself casually browsing for jobs that won’t require I ever touch a computer again.

notyourwork 7mo ago

Gatekeepers have to gatekeeper. Sigh.

pea 7mo ago

The darkest UX pattern I have ever hit is trying to cancel Google Workspace; whereby they disable the scrollbar on the page so you cannot actually get to the cancel button.

OhioMan2943 7mo ago
Welcome to the future :)
pzo 7mo ago
one time had cancel Google Colabs and really I couldn't figure out have to yell at them in support ticket to remove my subscription (eventually they did)
frizlab 7mo ago
Oh yes, I have had that! I tried disabling workspace for my brother-in-law through screen sharing and I thought it was a screen sharing issue. I successfully did it on my own computer but I’m glad to learn this was probably on purpose. I’m not crazy!
Macha 7mo ago
I get this on cookie consent modals too
shafyy 7mo ago
Yes, I want through this last year and documented it in a screencast. This is how it looks https://mstdn.social/@can/115243851196253381 https://mstdn.social/@can/115243851196253381 How is this legal?
- hrimfaxi 7mo ago
  It's probably not but no one has challenged them on it.
- ddalex 7mo ago
  Don't assign to malice what can be explained by incompetence: * new automated UX experiments starts * the UI bot made a change that made the page unscrollable * the experiment has a much higher rate of retention then the control (because people can't scroll) * the experiment is deemed a success by results analysis (no one looks at the page to see WHY) * the experiment is blessed as the new pipeline Such an obvious business improvement made by Gemini !

kdheiwns 7mo ago

An annoying extension of this is opening a Google maps link on mobile. It always prompts to open Google Maps (the app) no matter what. If you click no, its bugs the fuck out and opens an App Store link. If you click yes, even if you have Google Maps installed, it bugs the fuck out and opens an app store link. In neither case will it properly show the location on a first attempt. It's been like this for years. I'd ask what they're thinking when they came up with this, but I remain unconvinced that any such activity happens inside any Google offices today.

smelendez 7mo ago
I think this is an Apple bug. I’ve seen it with non-Google apps too. I’m not sure what causes it, but I believe sometimes you can long tap the link and select the correct option. I believe the behavior where you say no and it still tries to open the app is because the default behavior on Google Maps links is to open Google Maps.
- duskdozer 7mo ago
  This happens to me now on Android. It either wants to download google maps or if I try to open in browser, it just repeatedly refresh loops before drawing anything. But not always possible it seems to get the address by inspecting the link

hutattedonmyarm 7mo ago

the YouTube app does the same. Infuriating. I don't have Chrome installed and it doesn't list the only third party browser I _do_ have installed: Orion

froddd 7mo ago

I’m in the UK and use the Gmail app, I don’t ever see this sheet. Is this US-only? I don’t see the sheet for imgur.com either because, well, they’ve blocked access completely for UK users. :shrug:

tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
I see it in the UK.
- froddd 7mo ago
  The app settings offer a way to set default browser to the system default (which is what I have selected), as well as a toggle to “Ask me every time” — I have this turned off and never see the pop-up. EDIT: also just tested turning this checkbox off. I then clicked a link in an email, got the pop-up, unchecked “ask me every time”, clicked default browser, and didn’t see the pop-up next time.
  - swiftcoder 7mo ago
    Don’t worry, it’ll come back in a couple of months. Not sure if has a timeout, or if it gets reset by app updates, but that checkbox is only sticky enough to gaslight you into thinking it works

iqandjoke 7mo ago

If you use iPhone, you can use iOS Mail app (and with iCloud mail) if you really care. Apple dark UX pattern is that there always has badges on Settings app if you do not subscribe to iCloud even if you have manual backup. You cannot dismiss it.

tengwar2 7mo ago
I don't subscribe to iCloud, and have never seen these. Where do you see them?
Daedren 7mo ago
They keep enshittifying the experience for those not using iCloud Mail. They just removed the feature to use alternate email aliases on non-iCloud accounts on iOS 26.
iamcalledrob 7mo ago
This has tripped up non-technical family members who ask for help and aren't sure if they are required to pay for these things. "What is Arcade, am I supposed to be paying for it?" Sigh. Apple used to be better than this.

pftburger 7mo ago

I love the irony that the Imgur link asks you to install the Imgur app first

irae 7mo ago

I don't understand why people don't use alternative mail clients to avoid that? Is the Gmail app the only one that is good enough? If so, and if it is essential to you, just go with the bundle (Gmail, Chrome, etc). (FWIW, I left gmail entirely, I pay for my email provider)

babypuncher 7mo ago

This would drive me insane! I'm glad I ditched Gmail altogether.

aboardRat4 7mo ago

Please don't use imgur, it blocks off half of the internet. Use catbox.moe or imageban