7 ms·

A more modern Gmail app for Android

157 points by CaRDiaK 12y ago

pranjalv123 12y ago
If I use the IMAP feature, do all my non-gmail emails get sent to Google?
- christop 12y ago
  I was worried about this as well, and there seems to be no clear answer anywhere about this, but it appears not to work like the POP/IMAP fetching in Gmail. When I added my non-Gmail account to the app, I only saw traffic direct to the IMAP server, and nothing to Google servers.
- click170 12y ago
  I would assume the answer to that question is "no", because for an IMAP client there is no reason or need to send a copy of your emails or even the metadata to Google, and the shame and suspicion such a move would cause if they were caught doing it would be nontrivial. Not to mention, checking for it is not that hard. One way to test this though would be to setup outbound filtering (see my previous commments), and to use the always-on VPN functionality on your phone to shunt your traffic through said filter. This would allow you to see if any of your emails are being exfiltrated without your knowledge. I haven't tested this yet myself.
AndrewDucker 12y ago
Will I be able to turn conversation threading off?
mmanfrin 12y ago
I don't understand why Google is pushing two different email clients as the 'main' email clients for users of its phones.
- dmethvin 12y ago
  At the moment, they provide two very different views of email. Actually I guess you could say the old GMail client offers two different views itself, since it has both standard and priority inbox. It's not clear that Inbox is the right way to look at email for the majority of users, and I'm saying that as a user/tester. I've had to drop back to the regular GMail app do do things a couple of times and Inbox has crashed twice on me. Note that the GMail client did take on some of the look and feel such as the (+) widget on the bottom right.
  - icegreentea 12y ago
    The widget is the 'floating action button' in Material Design parlance. You're suppose to use it in screens which have a clear 'primary' purpose. In pretty much any email application, that'd be a compose email button from an inbox (or similar) view. So I guess in that particular case, it's not so much GMail taking from Inbox, so much as both of them are showcase material design apps, and Inbox just got released 'first'.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- pbreit 12y ago
  Inbox was sorta neat in the beginning but I quickly went back to Gmail. It actually doesn't seem all that different from Gmail's tabs.
  - ssully 12y ago
    I didn't really get it until I started managing emails in mass(or bundles if you want to use googles terms). I get a lot of email that isn't spam that I know at a glance if I need to read it or not. With Inbox I can really quickly archive a huge group of emails that I don't need. I have also used the pin and reminder feature a few times. I still think it's a weird thing to include with email, but it was helpful.
- kingnight 12y ago
danhsh 12y ago
why is there two apps gmail and inbox for email both developed by google?
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > why is there two apps gmail and inbox for email both developed by google? Because one of the whole points of having service-based software is that you can present different UIs on top of it for different audiences with the same backend, and this is a realization of that ability. Because Inbox is a fairly radical change with a strongly-opinionated workflow, while Gmail is -- while still advancing -- a relatively conservative, traditional email client. Having separate apps means people who are happy with the basic Gmail app and fairly conservative (in terms of workflow) improvements it gets are free to stick with it and not abandoned, while those who have (the frequently cited) problems with classic email that Inbox is designed to address can move to it and not be held back by the traditional design of email clients.
  - danhsh 12y ago
    sounds reasonable, btw remind me of wave. Having used both, I fell back onto gmail, as I still like the ordering of each individual email displayed in front of me, instead of encapsulating them into categorizes which I need to expand one by one to find the ones I am interested in.
bithush 12y ago
I recently moved away from Gmail because of the lack of push (via EAS) on non-Android devices. When Apple (iCloud) and MS (Outlook.com) offer push via EAS it annoys me Google killed it off unless you pay. Interestingly moving away from Gmail took me totally out of the Google world. I just switched to an iPhone from a Nexus 5 as the Nexus 6 was just too big and I have very happy using no Google account/services (outside of search). I wanted to try Inbox and got an invite on day 1 but have not bothered to try it yet as it would mean using Gmail again. Google bring back free EAS please! Also it always annoyed me how on Android they have two email apps, one for Gmail and one for other Email. Crappy experience really. The Gmail app should support other providers. I know it is coming soon but it should have from day one to be honest.
- ender7 12y ago
  ...one of the major features of this announcement is support for third-party e-mail providers.
- dozy 12y ago
  Doesn't the Gmail app on iOS use a push-system for delivery? Why would you want to use EAS for Gmail? Seems reasonably (and positively Apple-like) for Google to push people into the Gmail app where they control the experience and can surface first-party Gmail paradigms more readily. Admittedly I'm an Android user with limit experience with stock iOS mail app. Is the iOS mail app really that much better than the Gmail app?
  - IBM 12y ago
    The Gmail app has always felt like a web app and I much prefer Mail.app
  - evilduck 12y ago
    Gmail.app for iOS is incredibly sluggish (on my 5S) while Android's version on my Moto G is pretty snappy, so you're not experiencing the same thing at all. I run both Mail.app and Gmail.app on my iPhone because I'll often get the push notification for Gmail.app, tap the notification to open the email, get frustrated and tired waiting for it to load and just go manually refresh Mail.app and see it almost instantly.
simonsarris 12y ago
Very clean. A lot more stuff is "sized" consistently compared to the current Gmail on Android, which makes it look a lot more professional to me. If your interface is clean enough, you shouldn't have to break things up by changing the spacing/sizing/capital-case of the elements, like the current app does. This is a nice iteration. I'm happy about these recent app developments but all I really want for Christmas is a marginally newer Google Finance. It's been like ten years. The webapp still uses Flash.
- pbreit 12y ago
  I'm getting a little nervous that Google's apps are moving away from compact data presentation. For me, the poor use of screen real estate was the showstopper for Inbox. I realize I may have different tastes in which case I think the "Display Density" is an OK compromise (despite that the default is all that usually really matters).
  - ececconi 12y ago
    +1 for an updated Google finance app. I still think, no matter what some of my friends say, it's better than yahoo finance. Although, I think it gets the market cap wrong with a few stocks.
  - Touche 12y ago
    Meanwhile K9 is still the best mail client on Android, works fine with any IMAP mail host.
    - jordanthoms 12y ago
      K9's interface is still awful.
      - Touche 12y ago
        Specifically what do you dislike about it?
mark_l_watson 12y ago
It looks good but with the beta availability of InBox, I am not sure if I will even try the new Gmail UI. InBox is very nice, BTW. The web client is OK on my laptop, the iPad InBox app is nice to use, and for me the Android InBox app is such a hugely better experience than Gmail.
d0m 12y ago
How can I get it? On the playstore it doesn't let me update it. Is it only for newer devices?
- d0m 12y ago
  Answering my own question.. Will be available on the playstore in a few days. But can download it from Android Police here: http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/10/31/gmail-5-0-exchange-support-material-design-landed-apk-download/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/10/31/gmail-5-0-exchange-s...
- christop 12y ago
  Like most Google apps, it's a staged rollout so you won't see it yet. It runs on at least Android 4.0+. You can download and install the latest version from here if you don't want to wait: http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/gmail/gmail-5-0-1556543-apk/ http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/gmail/gmail-5-0-1556...
bluthru 12y ago
So many horizontal bars. I wish that the top two bars could be unified and shortened. The bottom bar for only three androids buttons is a huge waste, but they've painted themselves in a corner, there.
dools 12y ago
Can you turn off conversation view yet? Conversation view is the single worst software feature ever developed for any piece of software ever made. Boy I wish I could turn it off in the android gmail client.
- gareim 12y ago
  What do you not like about conversation view? As someone that's spent most of his email life with it, I'm kinda curious of the other side.
  - Touche 12y ago
    He/she is clearly trolling. Saying that a popular feature is "the single worst software feature ever developed for any piece of software ever made" is meant to illicit strong emotions, not conversation.
  - jph00 12y ago
    I wasn't the person that made the claim - but since I feel the same way (well, maybe not quite as strongly!)... I find I often lose track of earlier messages in a thread that I haven't yet responded to, because I reply to some other message from someone else who replied later. I also find that other people make the same mistake and as a result fail to reply to my emails to them sometimes. I find emails much easier to deal with when the actual emails are in the list, rather than the conversations - although when displaying the message there's no reason not to show it in the context of the conversation.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    Conversation view works fine for some types of conversations. For mailing lists, a threaded view is often handier. https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/thread_patterns/ https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/thread_patterns/
  - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
    I find conversation view confusing because a) it often compresses individual emails which then get lost b) it conflates emails which clearly do not belong to the same conversation. The former regularly causes colleagues to miss important email. The latter is common with automated mail. I always turn it off, but I think conversation view might be worth it with the following changes: 1. When viewing a conversation, always expand all email and cut quoted text from each email. The fact that quoted text is shown which duplicates email in the same conversation makes for a horrible mess. 2. Use the proper headers (Message-ID, IIRC) to determine which emails belong to the same conversation, rather than the current fuzzy-logic based on the subject and current phase of the moon. At the very least, implement this logic: two separate emails, neither of which are a reply to another email, do NOT belong to the same conversation.
politician 12y ago
It's nice. I just hope the email monetization features -- Social, Promos, Purchase Intent, Ads, Buy Stuff Now -- aren't as prominent as in Inbox. Of course, they used to let us disable them (in the desktop site). Now they're a key feature. That's progress, I guess.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Of course, they used to let us disable them (in the desktop site). Now they're a key feature. That's progress, I guess. They are not mandatory in the new Gmail app. I have been using a build of 5.0 for the last few days, and it provides a normal inbox as all previous versions.
buro9 12y ago
They seem to have accidentally taken the soundtrack from a guitar lesson and dropped it onto their Gmail video.
- ProAm 12y ago
  That video was extremely painful to watch because of the music.
conradfr 12y ago
I hope you will finally be able to include images in a mail (like in the desktop webapp) not just as an attached file, or maybe I just never found how to do it in the current client ?
- conradfr 12y ago
  self reply after getting the update : nope.
smickie 12y ago
Can anyone confirm or deny that this new Gmail supports media queries / displays mobile emails?
secfirstmd 12y ago
Meh, come back to me when you have some decent support for security. Like an easy PGP implementation
jsudhams 12y ago
Looks like firefox-os email app on firefox phone

157 points by CaRDiaK 12y ago

pranjalv123 12y ago

If I use the IMAP feature, do all my non-gmail emails get sent to Google?

christop 12y ago
I was worried about this as well, and there seems to be no clear answer anywhere about this, but it appears not to work like the POP/IMAP fetching in Gmail. When I added my non-Gmail account to the app, I only saw traffic direct to the IMAP server, and nothing to Google servers.
click170 12y ago
I would assume the answer to that question is "no", because for an IMAP client there is no reason or need to send a copy of your emails or even the metadata to Google, and the shame and suspicion such a move would cause if they were caught doing it would be nontrivial. Not to mention, checking for it is not that hard. One way to test this though would be to setup outbound filtering (see my previous commments), and to use the always-on VPN functionality on your phone to shunt your traffic through said filter. This would allow you to see if any of your emails are being exfiltrated without your knowledge. I haven't tested this yet myself.

AndrewDucker 12y ago

Will I be able to turn conversation threading off?

mmanfrin 12y ago

I don't understand why Google is pushing two different email clients as the 'main' email clients for users of its phones.

dmethvin 12y ago
At the moment, they provide two very different views of email. Actually I guess you could say the old GMail client offers two different views itself, since it has both standard and priority inbox. It's not clear that Inbox is the right way to look at email for the majority of users, and I'm saying that as a user/tester. I've had to drop back to the regular GMail app do do things a couple of times and Inbox has crashed twice on me. Note that the GMail client did take on some of the look and feel such as the (+) widget on the bottom right.
- icegreentea 12y ago
  The widget is the 'floating action button' in Material Design parlance. You're suppose to use it in screens which have a clear 'primary' purpose. In pretty much any email application, that'd be a compose email button from an inbox (or similar) view. So I guess in that particular case, it's not so much GMail taking from Inbox, so much as both of them are showcase material design apps, and Inbox just got released 'first'.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
pbreit 12y ago
Inbox was sorta neat in the beginning but I quickly went back to Gmail. It actually doesn't seem all that different from Gmail's tabs.
- ssully 12y ago
  I didn't really get it until I started managing emails in mass(or bundles if you want to use googles terms). I get a lot of email that isn't spam that I know at a glance if I need to read it or not. With Inbox I can really quickly archive a huge group of emails that I don't need. I have also used the pin and reminder feature a few times. I still think it's a weird thing to include with email, but it was helpful.
kingnight 12y ago

danhsh 12y ago

why is there two apps gmail and inbox for email both developed by google?

dragonwriter 12y ago
> why is there two apps gmail and inbox for email both developed by google? Because one of the whole points of having service-based software is that you can present different UIs on top of it for different audiences with the same backend, and this is a realization of that ability. Because Inbox is a fairly radical change with a strongly-opinionated workflow, while Gmail is -- while still advancing -- a relatively conservative, traditional email client. Having separate apps means people who are happy with the basic Gmail app and fairly conservative (in terms of workflow) improvements it gets are free to stick with it and not abandoned, while those who have (the frequently cited) problems with classic email that Inbox is designed to address can move to it and not be held back by the traditional design of email clients.
- danhsh 12y ago
  sounds reasonable, btw remind me of wave. Having used both, I fell back onto gmail, as I still like the ordering of each individual email displayed in front of me, instead of encapsulating them into categorizes which I need to expand one by one to find the ones I am interested in.

bithush 12y ago

I recently moved away from Gmail because of the lack of push (via EAS) on non-Android devices. When Apple (iCloud) and MS (Outlook.com) offer push via EAS it annoys me Google killed it off unless you pay. Interestingly moving away from Gmail took me totally out of the Google world. I just switched to an iPhone from a Nexus 5 as the Nexus 6 was just too big and I have very happy using no Google account/services (outside of search). I wanted to try Inbox and got an invite on day 1 but have not bothered to try it yet as it would mean using Gmail again. Google bring back free EAS please! Also it always annoyed me how on Android they have two email apps, one for Gmail and one for other Email. Crappy experience really. The Gmail app should support other providers. I know it is coming soon but it should have from day one to be honest.

ender7 12y ago
...one of the major features of this announcement is support for third-party e-mail providers.
dozy 12y ago
Doesn't the Gmail app on iOS use a push-system for delivery? Why would you want to use EAS for Gmail? Seems reasonably (and positively Apple-like) for Google to push people into the Gmail app where they control the experience and can surface first-party Gmail paradigms more readily. Admittedly I'm an Android user with limit experience with stock iOS mail app. Is the iOS mail app really that much better than the Gmail app?
- IBM 12y ago
  The Gmail app has always felt like a web app and I much prefer Mail.app
- evilduck 12y ago
  Gmail.app for iOS is incredibly sluggish (on my 5S) while Android's version on my Moto G is pretty snappy, so you're not experiencing the same thing at all. I run both Mail.app and Gmail.app on my iPhone because I'll often get the push notification for Gmail.app, tap the notification to open the email, get frustrated and tired waiting for it to load and just go manually refresh Mail.app and see it almost instantly.

simonsarris 12y ago

Very clean. A lot more stuff is "sized" consistently compared to the current Gmail on Android, which makes it look a lot more professional to me. If your interface is clean enough, you shouldn't have to break things up by changing the spacing/sizing/capital-case of the elements, like the current app does. This is a nice iteration. I'm happy about these recent app developments but all I really want for Christmas is a marginally newer Google Finance. It's been like ten years. The webapp still uses Flash.

pbreit 12y ago
I'm getting a little nervous that Google's apps are moving away from compact data presentation. For me, the poor use of screen real estate was the showstopper for Inbox. I realize I may have different tastes in which case I think the "Display Density" is an OK compromise (despite that the default is all that usually really matters).
- ececconi 12y ago
  +1 for an updated Google finance app. I still think, no matter what some of my friends say, it's better than yahoo finance. Although, I think it gets the market cap wrong with a few stocks.
- Touche 12y ago
  Meanwhile K9 is still the best mail client on Android, works fine with any IMAP mail host.
  - jordanthoms 12y ago
    K9's interface is still awful.
    - Touche 12y ago
      Specifically what do you dislike about it?

mark_l_watson 12y ago

It looks good but with the beta availability of InBox, I am not sure if I will even try the new Gmail UI. InBox is very nice, BTW. The web client is OK on my laptop, the iPad InBox app is nice to use, and for me the Android InBox app is such a hugely better experience than Gmail.

d0m 12y ago

How can I get it? On the playstore it doesn't let me update it. Is it only for newer devices?

d0m 12y ago
Answering my own question.. Will be available on the playstore in a few days. But can download it from Android Police here: http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/10/31/gmail-5-0-exchange-support-material-design-landed-apk-download/ http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/10/31/gmail-5-0-exchange-s...
christop 12y ago
Like most Google apps, it's a staged rollout so you won't see it yet. It runs on at least Android 4.0+. You can download and install the latest version from here if you don't want to wait: http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/gmail/gmail-5-0-1556543-apk/ http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/gmail/gmail-5-0-1556...

bluthru 12y ago

So many horizontal bars. I wish that the top two bars could be unified and shortened. The bottom bar for only three androids buttons is a huge waste, but they've painted themselves in a corner, there.

dools 12y ago

Can you turn off conversation view yet? Conversation view is the single worst software feature ever developed for any piece of software ever made. Boy I wish I could turn it off in the android gmail client.

gareim 12y ago
What do you not like about conversation view? As someone that's spent most of his email life with it, I'm kinda curious of the other side.
- Touche 12y ago
  He/she is clearly trolling. Saying that a popular feature is "the single worst software feature ever developed for any piece of software ever made" is meant to illicit strong emotions, not conversation.
- jph00 12y ago
  I wasn't the person that made the claim - but since I feel the same way (well, maybe not quite as strongly!)... I find I often lose track of earlier messages in a thread that I haven't yet responded to, because I reply to some other message from someone else who replied later. I also find that other people make the same mistake and as a result fail to reply to my emails to them sometimes. I find emails much easier to deal with when the actual emails are in the list, rather than the conversations - although when displaying the message there's no reason not to show it in the context of the conversation.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Conversation view works fine for some types of conversations. For mailing lists, a threaded view is often handier. https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/thread_patterns/ https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/thread_patterns/
- oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
  I find conversation view confusing because a) it often compresses individual emails which then get lost b) it conflates emails which clearly do not belong to the same conversation. The former regularly causes colleagues to miss important email. The latter is common with automated mail. I always turn it off, but I think conversation view might be worth it with the following changes: 1. When viewing a conversation, always expand all email and cut quoted text from each email. The fact that quoted text is shown which duplicates email in the same conversation makes for a horrible mess. 2. Use the proper headers (Message-ID, IIRC) to determine which emails belong to the same conversation, rather than the current fuzzy-logic based on the subject and current phase of the moon. At the very least, implement this logic: two separate emails, neither of which are a reply to another email, do NOT belong to the same conversation.

politician 12y ago

It's nice. I just hope the email monetization features -- Social, Promos, Purchase Intent, Ads, Buy Stuff Now -- aren't as prominent as in Inbox. Of course, they used to let us disable them (in the desktop site). Now they're a key feature. That's progress, I guess.

danieldk 12y ago
Of course, they used to let us disable them (in the desktop site). Now they're a key feature. That's progress, I guess. They are not mandatory in the new Gmail app. I have been using a build of 5.0 for the last few days, and it provides a normal inbox as all previous versions.

buro9 12y ago

They seem to have accidentally taken the soundtrack from a guitar lesson and dropped it onto their Gmail video.

ProAm 12y ago
That video was extremely painful to watch because of the music.

conradfr 12y ago

I hope you will finally be able to include images in a mail (like in the desktop webapp) not just as an attached file, or maybe I just never found how to do it in the current client ?

conradfr 12y ago
self reply after getting the update : nope.

smickie 12y ago

Can anyone confirm or deny that this new Gmail supports media queries / displays mobile emails?

secfirstmd 12y ago

Meh, come back to me when you have some decent support for security. Like an easy PGP implementation

jsudhams 12y ago

Looks like firefox-os email app on firefox phone