Their mega-corp billions could have supported the two for years to come even if it was only to keep me happy. The app was around for 5 years! It should still be here! Life was fine with two email apps from Google.
You know what, after admitting above that I was foolish for giving my life over to Inbox, I take it back. Google brought a handful of Inbox’s best features to Gmail and certainly improved their most used app, but the little things that mad Inbox truly great never did. I wrote about all that was missing from Gmail in this post prior to Google killing Inbox and most of that still applies. The “Snooze” option in notifications, the freakin’ trip bundles (!), and the blue color vs. Man, the animations and gestures to move around were so fun to use. They all seem far away from email and not easily accessible and I’ve stopped using Google for them, which is why Inbox putting them front and center made sense because we all spend countless hours each day in our inboxes. For reminders now, you either have to open Keep or Assistant or Tasks or who knows what. They simply lived at the top of your inbox, constantly reminding you to deal with them. The reminders that lived within Inbox were the best implementation of any Google reminder functionality. Rather than single-tapping to multi-select or dealing with each email 1-by-1, Inbox brought efficiencies that Gmail hasn’t.
My morning often started with a quick scan of the emails I actually needed to read followed by a single-tap batch archive of newsletters and other spam-ish stuff. The separation of emails by day or week or month made it simple to keep track of older emails you probably put off dealing with, but as a benefit of that organization, it let you batch archive emails too. Gmail still can’t match the way Inbox organized almost everything.
Google rarely keeps their experiments or smaller-team projects around and it never really made sense for Inbox and Gmail to co-exist, but I couldn’t help myself. It was without a doubt my favorite Google app.įully buying into Inbox was probably a foolish mistake by many of us, especially since it launched as more of an experiment than anything. The blue-toned smarter inbox with intuitive gestures and a more organized layout has been gone for two years now, yet I still wish I could find a way to use it. To do this, simply open Gmail in Chrome, then click the three-dotted menu icon at the top right -> More tools -> Create shortcut. The next step is to turn Gmail into a regular desktop app. There are few apps that have come and gone over the years that I’ve truly missed as much as Google’s Inbox email app. Create Gmail Desktop App (Chrome) So your Gmail inbox is now syncing offline, but you still need to open your Chrome browser to access it.