Everyone suspected it for a while. Their active Twitter account refused for months to say when the app would be updated for the iPhone X.
Personally, I suspect that they painted themselves into a bit of a corner with the tech stack they choose for Inbox. They used a unique C++ to JS compiler to run Inbox in the browser. This worked decently well in Chrome, but the experience in other browsers has been a lot choppier. It's possible the same codebase was also compiled to iOS and this is what caused the very long delay in updating for the iPhone X.
I'm sad to see it go. The UX in the official Gmail app isn't quite as good. The bundle workflow they developed for working through your inbox is something I haven't seen elsewhere.
I'm sure it's a little bit of both, right? If 99% of Gmail users had voluntarily migrated to Inbox, I'm quite certain it would not be getting shut down. That doesn't preclude that there is a significant contingent out there that loves Inbox.
(BTW the same goes for the old HN hobby-horse, Reader. If it had had a billion users, it would never have gotten shut down.)
If the product isn't helping the bottom line, companies will sunset it. "Free beer" would be the most widely adopted offering a bar could have, but it's not going to be good business for the bar.
Google's ADHD with products strikes again. It's really hard to get excited over new Google offerings because they just go away when Google gets bored of them, time and time again.
Maybe but I still think there's more than that. There's 400,000 reviews, so even if they're counting people that install it multiple times it's probably not a 10:1 ratio. Also I think "10 million+" on the play store means 10,000,000 - 50,000,000, and that doesn't count iOS and web users.
It is a cycle. Google drops a product due to low uptick, so users don't take on further products. There are three products that I can think of that have lasted: search, email, ads (which is search, really).
Voice. I've been using Voice for probably 10 years now. Most of the functionality has been subsumed by Hangouts, but it's still there and they even updated it within the last year.
It could very well be the other way around too: product is getting too popular and doesn't have ads, but directly competes with our product that does have ads.
Reader/iGoogle didn't have ads, but stopped you from visiting places that did have ads.
Inbox didn't have ads, but was directly pulling users away from gmail which does.
They bought Youtube and it served Ads. Calendar is part of Gmail. Groups is pretty much dead and hasn't been upgraded in years. Android and Chrome are part of Ads. Docs is probably the only new feature that they've developed, but people pay a good amount of money for it.
None of which I missed. I'm a poweruser in most of my computer interactions, but e-mail isn't one of them. I actually really liked Inbox's restricted feature set.
> It's likely not google get bored, but users didn't adapt product on large enough scale.
What exactly is a "large enough scale"?
The mentality that a project is a failure unless it achieves exponential growth and massive world-eating scale needs to die in a fire.
Even small things have value, and one of the few good things about massive corporations is they have the resources to do a lot small things well. When you have 85,000 employees, focus is overrated.
> When you have 85,000 employees, focus is overrated.
probably less than half of them are engineers, and about 20% of them are capable to build complex systems. And now Google has quite long list of technologically complex products: search, ads, youtube, android. I think density of complex projects per capita may be much higher at Google than in other companies.
> Even small things have value, and one of the few good things about massive corporations is they have the resources to do a lot small things well. When you have 85,000 employees, focus is overrated.
I like to think I understand the sentiment, but I think the reality is a bit more nuanced than that.
Inbox and GMail in all likeliness are in the same product area (PA) and thus at some point in the chain they report to the same person.
That being the case, if Inbox takes even 1/2 the time of this manager that GMail takes, then it's really not worth it because GMail easily has more than 10x the users.
My guess is that they will try to take all the things people liked about Inbox and bring them to GMail over time. They probably want to shut down Inbox before that happens so they can use more engineering resources to make that transition more quickly and also so that the tech stack is simpler by not having to support two different products.
The reason I didn't adopt Inbox (for Android) initially was that it only worked for GMail whereas the regular GMail client also worked with 3rd party mail accounts.
I was also extremely hesitant because of Google's history of canning experimental apps and Inbox simply isn't integral enough to be safe from the routine culling (unlike e.g. Chrome or Maps).
I was an early adopter for Wave (which ended up going nowhere because nobody I knew wanted to give it a try and I didn't have enough invites to hand them out without knowing people would use them). I tried to get on Orkut but never got an invite (until it had already basically become the "Facebook of South America"). I strongly believed in Google+ as a potential Facebook killer and used it early on. I was also an avid user of Reader in the Web 2.0 days.
At this point, I no longer trust new Google products. Google seems to really want me to use Duo, for example, but nobody I know is eager to use it and I won't talk my friends into using it if it's not clear that it's here to stay. I'm not committing to any Google product if I don't have reason to believe they won't pull the rug whenever they please.
> Google seems to really want me to use Duo, for example, but nobody I know is eager to use it and I won't talk my friends into using it if it's not clear that it's here to stay.
Not to dismiss the rest of your point which is totally valid and a well deserved criticism, but you can use Duo to call people with Android phones even if they don't have Duo, so you don't actually need to convince them to use it.
Ironical in this particular case, as inbox was the first mail client that helped my ADHD-PI brain keep a reasonably clean inbox, while still actually responding to people.
Not trying to be facetious or anything, but honestly I wonder why at this point anybody would bother using any Google product besides the triumvirate of Search/Maps/Gmail.
>Inbox was obviously a place the gmail team used for experimentation
What was "obvious" about it? Here's how Google introduced it: "Inbox by Gmail is a new app from the Gmail team. Inbox is an organized place to get things done and get back to what matters. Bundles keep emails organized."
Do you see anything about it being an "experiment" to eventually throw away? Not to mention Gmail already had the Labs feature for experiments.
In fact, what 2 Google representatives had said at the time was:
""We hope, in the long run, that most of our users will be on Inbox." (Alex Gawley)
"We care deeply about Gmail and Gmail users, but in the long run, as we add more features to Inbox and respond to user feedback, we hope that everyone will want to use Inbox instead of Gmail. Ultimately, our users will decide." (Jason Cornwell, Inbox's lead designer)
I couldn't have said it better myself! They tried to sell it as the possible evolution of Gmail. Not some 'experiment' that would partially flow into the Gmail they asked us to abandon for Inbox in the first place.
You've repeatedly created accounts with a propaganda agenda for Google. You've been doing it for years. We've banned you many times before, and I've banned this account. Doing this is a serious abuse of HN, regardless of the company you're promoting or what your motive is. Would you please stop?
HN is for curious humans to exchange thoughts in community. It's hard to imagine anything that undermines curiosity or community worse than this. We frequently ask users not to accuse each other of astroturfing or shilling without evidence, but when we do find evidence—and there's a lot of it in this case—we come down hard pretty quickly.
Keep is the next app that I expect to get axed. It's amazing and hugely useful and, crucially, nobody ever talks about it - just like Inbox. Perfectly positioned to be killed.
I say the same about startups. I resent that they don't keep pouring their time, money, and passion into efforts that lack product/market fit. As long as I'm not paying for it, I vote that they continue investing.
I went from 10000+ unread emails to inbox-zero. I honestly don’t think I could have taken the leap without Inbox. True, I don’t need the bundling feature as much any more, but I’m sad the product is going away.
Exactly that. I really digged the different philosophy Inbox brought to the table. You had "Inbox Zero" by creating a Task List out of your inbox. It was practically a todo list made up of emails. With scheduling, reminders, pinning and stuff. And automatically sorting into bundles like social, purchases or trips. Man I will miss the automatic bundling of all my trip related mails.
YES. it doesn't matter if you CAN possibly recreate some of the functionality in gmail. it matters if the app guides you to your preferred workflow. Inbox made it easier to keep inbox zero than not. Thats the difference.
It's really interesting to see the super-knee jerk reaction here when the article itself even says that most of the features made their way into gmail.
(I was a heavy inbox user, and i am happy with the stuff that made it's way into gmail).
Outside of some of the bundling features, i'm curious what actual difference people are complaining about here.
People are complaining about having to switch apps. Users have found something that works and they've gotten used to it. Now they'll be forced to switch for no apparent value add. Why do you think people would be okay with that?
It's a general statement on the world that people hate all change :)
People have always argued literally every change has no value add for them (and i'm sure for large enough things, there are always people for which that is true).
So that part doesn't bug me.
But that's not what most of the comments seem to be.
Because honestly, if the only complaint people have is "i had to open a different app", that's actually really good for any transition.
- might cause incompatibilities with existing tools.
No wonder people mostly don't like updates, especially if they are forced upon them, and if the advantages are not clear.
Imho, to address the above points, software should let the user decide when they perform the update, and the user should always be allowed to switch back. Note that this might require data to be migrated back and forth, but of course that's the vendor's problem.
Come on. It's one of the essential, fundamental apps/services for many people with all the strong feelings attached to that. For a Googler to show up and start publicly calling users' reactions 'kneejerk' (completely independent of the accuracy of the claim) and then go on to philosophizing broadly on the nature of change amounts to trolling.
Deleting/sweeping a section of emails away on mobile is a huge productivity boost for me. The Gmail app on Android doesn't have this feature from what I can tell.
Snooze was a big one too, but that got crippled in Inbox a while ago as well.
The ability to mark emails as done or to pin them were hallmark features of the Inbox interface and they both take significantly more work in Gmail. I'm severely disappointed that they've decided to axe Inbox without at least pretending to care - by eg. providing a user survey.
Inbox builds on a set of useful primitive ideas, but understanding them is necessary to understand pinning's value.
The central idea of Inbox is that your goal is INBOX ZERO, and that after dealing with any email, you swipe it to the side (or mark it as Done with the checkmark in the web UI) and _do not see it again_. (Like 'Archive' in Gmail.)
The second idea is that your emails are Bundled by category. This is similar to a tag or a filter, but you can choose to have them still show (as a bundle) in the inbox, rather than being filtered to not-seen oblivion. For example, I had one bundle for Pull Requests, another for Jira notifications. The app auto-categorizers things for Finances, Promos, etc, so many of the spam-like newsletters you get will end up bundled together. (Bundles default to only showing things that are not Done, unless you click a bundle's category on the left navigation bar.)
That doesn't sound very useful. What makes it useful is that you can archive/Done an entire category. All of those emails from TeeFury, Newegg, Amazon, Steam, Github, etc that you would normally consider usually-clutter suddenly are SUPER easy to deal with. It basically makes archiving those no longer annoying, as you can do it all at once. Best of all, you see them first, so it's harder to have something get filtered without being noticed.
Pinning prevents you from archiving an item (unless you explicitly click it). This means that you can ping something in a bundle, archive the bundle, and it will archive all the other things, and leave the bundle with that one item visible.
I am profoundly saddened that Inbox is going away. As others have said, it _changed my life_ in terms of how I dealt with overwhelming email volumes at work.
Marking emails as done is just as easy in gmail as it was in inbox (I switched back a while ago). In inbox, swiping to "done" is equivalent to applying the archived label, which you can (in android and web, though apparently not ios), have swiping/closing the email do.
Do you mean like selecting multiple (which I believe is possible, but I don't have the gmail app handy to check) and then labelling them all together, or like swiping a bundle away (which there is nothing analogous to I don't believe)
This is what I'm going to miss most. Heard the news and went to check the Gmail app only to realize I was going to have to spend much more time in my inbox.
I was bothered about the same thing but it looks like in the Gmail app you can configure the left/right swipes separately to "Archive", "Delete", "Mark as read/unread", "Move to", "Snooze" and "None". The default seems to be both set to "Archive".
>It's really interesting to see the super-knee jerk reaction here when the article itself even says that most of the features made their way into gmail.
We didn't just want "most [Inbox] features into gmail". We wanted Inbox's UI and basic approach further developed.
Can confirm that what I want is Inbox's UI. The ease of postponing items into the "Snoozed" queue, and low-effort addition of task items, are both lacking from the stock GMail app.
Not surprising, developing new features for iOS isn't Google's highest priority, they're targeting where most of the installed userbase is.
Similar effects can be seen in the OTT market. Roku gets new features from Sling, Netflix and the other OTT players first, with Chromecast and Fire TV lagging by months or years, and these 2nd tier players are missing Amazon Prime Video (Chromecast) or YouTube (Fire TV) respectively. It seems much like the music sales market IMO...
Settings -> Inbox -> Categories is analogous, although IMO the UI isn't as nice. I also don't know if that lets you do custom bundles, although that's a feature I never used in Inbox.
Edit: and the gmail version of bundles has fewer categories than Inbox does
Where? “Categories” were in Gmail before Inbox, but there still doesn't seem to be any way to get them bundled in the inbox the way Inbox’s primary display does, though you can set them as separate inboxes.
Inbox users have had all of this and more since 2014, though. And even if Gmail has some of these features the interface is not nearly as natural for using them.
The reason I still use Inbox on Android, even when GMail has most of the same features is its interface design. I much prefer Inbox's approach where the emphesis is on the email subject instead of GMail's emphesis on sender. 90% of my emails are with the same 2-3 colleauges. They represent different threads for different projects and tasks. Gmail interface makes finding the right email cumbersome. I will continue using Inbox until it stops working.
I never used Inbox, but this seems like another sign that Google has moved to the next stage in the corporate life cycle; they don't need a testbed for innovative features because they're no longer in the innovation business.
Just because they've finished with the features Inbox was a testbed for (which I am deeply disappointed by because Inbox is so much better than Gmail as a daily driver) doesn't mean they are abandoning that kind of testing approach and have no further use for it.
Gmail doesn't have reminders - and my reminders that I've saved and snoozed, many of which are past March of next year will apparently just disappear once Inbox is sunsetted?
I'm with you. That's the only way I'd use gmail. When traveling it's so handy to open up the trips and get all your flight/car rental/hotel details in one small space.
I get a ton of email and Inbox does a good job of popping a notification for only the truly important ones. Regular Gmail has the "important" flag which you can train but I get the sense it's not using the same signals or the same algo.
Unread counts. They make me anxious. I have Inbox only show emails sent to me. Everything else gets bundled and up at 8AM. Inbox doesn't show unread counts anywhere. I don't have to feel like I'm constantly behind.
I think the important point for me is not like "This is a nice to have" or "I don't like extra clicking" it's "This affects my actual health." Literally, it's my health. Not doing this makes people who have mental illnesses like anxiety more unwell.
Reminders aren't in Gmail, are they? I don't like having to check two inboxes, multiple times a day. Do you know why Google didn't add reminders to Gmail?
You also seem to believe that more features are always better, but part of Inbox's charm was that it wasn't bloated like Gmail.
I'm actually thinking of switching to a different email service because of this. Gmail is just way to cluttered for my taste, inbox's model where you can just check off emails and they're gone was such a time-saver and a fresh breath of air.
I hope I can find something as simplistic and at the same time feature rich somewhere else :(
I've wanted to for a long time;Inbox put that on hold because it made my email manageable again. Clearly it's time to start looking for alternatives again.
I wish I knew of any, but after having tried Gmail again after this announcement, I really don't want to go back. If I can't find any I might be forced to write my own.
Inbox was the first tool that helped me reach "inbox zero". I really liked the feel of seeing the cute landscape after I was done with my email. Anyways I saw this coming since they took a lot of time to update their app for the iPhone X.
Damnit, I love inbox and I use it everyday. Much preferred to the GMAIL ui, seemed less cluttered to me and the swiping features to archive/snooze/pin were great. Yikes. It worked really well out of the box for bundling and didn't need much configuration. RIP inbox.
I tried to move to Inbox but kept having to use the Gmail app after I would see alerts for mail and then was unable to find the message in question in Inbox without searching, which is tedious. The "missed messages" problem was one I couldn't ever get past (maybe my own settings were to blame -- but at the end of the day it wasn't worth the time to figure out).
I still use Inbox and I love it. I snooze reminders all the time for bills and regular maintenance tasks. If I snoozed something for a few years from now, does anyone know if it'll work in gmail?
I'm a happy and heavy user of Inbox, this came as a shock to me. I guess I'll wait and see by January how is Gmail, but I'm not looking forward.
> By retiring Inbox, is Google losing a valuable ability to experiment with new email functionality in a way that’s tough to do with a billion-user mainstay?
I also agree with this. If Google decided to let Inbox go, same way as with Wave, then the next "email UX experiment" will be another codename. Why not use the existing Inbox product to do the next innovation? Its base is formed by users which already showed adoption to new ideas and UI.
> Why not use the existing Inbox product to do the next innovation?
Because the next innovation may be a completely different direction. I much prefer Inbox to Gmail, but I'd be a lot less happy for the Inbox name to be kept but the actual app to replaced by some completely new vision.
> Its base is formed by users which already showed adoption to new ideas and UI.
I bought into Inbox’s specific vision, not the generic idea of novelty. If Inbox didn't work out for Google, I'm disappointed, but I'd rather they kill it openly than that I get force fed some new unrelated novelty approach because I was using Inbox and must therefore be into whatever.
I really hated Inbox. I thought it was one of the worst ideas they had come up with in years. But, after seeing the amount of support that it has in this thread, I'm sad it's going just for the thing you mentioned. They could have kept this as an experimental ground to give the rest of the users good features that weren't so disruptive to what we are used to.
Well, I suppose I'll be looking for a replacement to Gmail pretty quick. Long time inbox user from the beginning, and Gmail still isn't caught up to it in UI/UX, plus loads of my "Done" emails in inbox still show up in Gmail.
I think by now it would be worth for Google to re-think their branding strategy. How about releasing new experimental products off-brand? Google by now has a reputation of discontinuing products (some very vocal) users love.
This makes it very difficult for new Google-branded products to gain traction. Especially if the onboarding is costly & discontinuation would hurt a lot (e.g. Google Cloud, Dart, productivity apps, …).
Another approach could be to build a brand around their 'enterprise' offerings with SLAs & LTS and make it more explicit which products are covered and which aren't.
Good point. Another way is to release new products as "Experimental". When you try to use one for the first time, you'll get a big red warning saying this product may be discontinued any time. Any product that Google is committed to wouldn't have this experimental label.
That way, Google can keep trying things out, early adopters who want them can use them, and the rest of us can keep away. Everyone's happy. Google will stop hurting themselves by developing a reputation that none of their products can be depended on to stick around.
Both your strategy and mine require Google to first be clear about what they want to commit to. Currently, they're not — they just throw things at the wall to see what sticks, but that's hurting their reputation, so they need to do better.
Ok, this was the last thing that will push me off of Google services. I was already reluctant to use their new apps and services and was pondering moving anyway. Anyhow only thing that does not have proper replacement is Photos but I will manage.
458 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadPersonally, I suspect that they painted themselves into a bit of a corner with the tech stack they choose for Inbox. They used a unique C++ to JS compiler to run Inbox in the browser. This worked decently well in Chrome, but the experience in other browsers has been a lot choppier. It's possible the same codebase was also compiled to iOS and this is what caused the very long delay in updating for the iPhone X.
I'm sad to see it go. The UX in the official Gmail app isn't quite as good. The bundle workflow they developed for working through your inbox is something I haven't seen elsewhere.
This has to mean that the product wasn't seeing the adoption they were hoping for.
(BTW the same goes for the old HN hobby-horse, Reader. If it had had a billion users, it would never have gotten shut down.)
If the product isn't helping the bottom line, companies will sunset it. "Free beer" would be the most widely adopted offering a bar could have, but it's not going to be good business for the bar.
Thats not always true especially with Google. Anything that helps tighten the already tight grip they have on users directly affects the bottom line.
I would love to read some reasoning behind that. I'm really trying to come up with pro arguments but can't.
However only business logic is transpiled, the UI layer on every platform is written by hand in the native impedance matched language of the platform.
That's as clear a sign as you can expect that users don't want Inbox, notwithstanding a noisy minority like us.
[edit] oh, and maps!
I wonder if any regulations around phone numbers is actually what it protecting Voice from getting nuked from CEO orbit.
Reader/iGoogle didn't have ads, but stopped you from visiting places that did have ads.
Inbox didn't have ads, but was directly pulling users away from gmail which does.
Docs was an acquisition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs,_Sheets,_and_Slide...
Because users know it wont be a product that gets any updates and will be shutdown in 2 years.
What exactly is a "large enough scale"?
The mentality that a project is a failure unless it achieves exponential growth and massive world-eating scale needs to die in a fire.
Even small things have value, and one of the few good things about massive corporations is they have the resources to do a lot small things well. When you have 85,000 employees, focus is overrated.
probably less than half of them are engineers, and about 20% of them are capable to build complex systems. And now Google has quite long list of technologically complex products: search, ads, youtube, android. I think density of complex projects per capita may be much higher at Google than in other companies.
I like to think I understand the sentiment, but I think the reality is a bit more nuanced than that.
Inbox and GMail in all likeliness are in the same product area (PA) and thus at some point in the chain they report to the same person.
That being the case, if Inbox takes even 1/2 the time of this manager that GMail takes, then it's really not worth it because GMail easily has more than 10x the users.
My guess is that they will try to take all the things people liked about Inbox and bring them to GMail over time. They probably want to shut down Inbox before that happens so they can use more engineering resources to make that transition more quickly and also so that the tech stack is simpler by not having to support two different products.
I was also extremely hesitant because of Google's history of canning experimental apps and Inbox simply isn't integral enough to be safe from the routine culling (unlike e.g. Chrome or Maps).
I was an early adopter for Wave (which ended up going nowhere because nobody I knew wanted to give it a try and I didn't have enough invites to hand them out without knowing people would use them). I tried to get on Orkut but never got an invite (until it had already basically become the "Facebook of South America"). I strongly believed in Google+ as a potential Facebook killer and used it early on. I was also an avid user of Reader in the Web 2.0 days.
At this point, I no longer trust new Google products. Google seems to really want me to use Duo, for example, but nobody I know is eager to use it and I won't talk my friends into using it if it's not clear that it's here to stay. I'm not committing to any Google product if I don't have reason to believe they won't pull the rug whenever they please.
Not to dismiss the rest of your point which is totally valid and a well deserved criticism, but you can use Duo to call people with Android phones even if they don't have Duo, so you don't actually need to convince them to use it.
What's the point?
(I was an exclusively-inbox user for quite a while)
I'm happy just using gmail now that the features are there.
I tried some of the extra bundling features and just didn't find them that useful. It was kind of nice but not so nice that i really miss it.
Inbox’s basic organization hasn't, and that's it's key useful feature and the one most of the rest build on.
Inbox was obviously a place the gmail team used for experimentation and now they are folding it back in.
Besides you're making it sound like there was some huge cost involved in adopting or in abandoning Inbox, which there isn't.
What was "obvious" about it? Here's how Google introduced it: "Inbox by Gmail is a new app from the Gmail team. Inbox is an organized place to get things done and get back to what matters. Bundles keep emails organized."
Do you see anything about it being an "experiment" to eventually throw away? Not to mention Gmail already had the Labs feature for experiments.
In fact, what 2 Google representatives had said at the time was:
""We hope, in the long run, that most of our users will be on Inbox." (Alex Gawley)
"We care deeply about Gmail and Gmail users, but in the long run, as we add more features to Inbox and respond to user feedback, we hope that everyone will want to use Inbox instead of Gmail. Ultimately, our users will decide." (Jason Cornwell, Inbox's lead designer)
HN is for curious humans to exchange thoughts in community. It's hard to imagine anything that undermines curiosity or community worse than this. We frequently ask users not to accuse each other of astroturfing or shilling without evidence, but when we do find evidence—and there's a lot of it in this case—we come down hard pretty quickly.
1. https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy-print...
Oh well.
(I was a heavy inbox user, and i am happy with the stuff that made it's way into gmail).
Outside of some of the bundling features, i'm curious what actual difference people are complaining about here.
It's a general statement on the world that people hate all change :)
People have always argued literally every change has no value add for them (and i'm sure for large enough things, there are always people for which that is true).
So that part doesn't bug me.
But that's not what most of the comments seem to be. Because honestly, if the only complaint people have is "i had to open a different app", that's actually really good for any transition.
- causes uncertainty (will this still work?);
- often comes at an inconvenient time;
- requires the user to re-learn the software;
- might cause incompatibilities with existing tools.
No wonder people mostly don't like updates, especially if they are forced upon them, and if the advantages are not clear.
Imho, to address the above points, software should let the user decide when they perform the update, and the user should always be allowed to switch back. Note that this might require data to be migrated back and forth, but of course that's the vendor's problem.
Snooze was a big one too, but that got crippled in Inbox a while ago as well.
The central idea of Inbox is that your goal is INBOX ZERO, and that after dealing with any email, you swipe it to the side (or mark it as Done with the checkmark in the web UI) and _do not see it again_. (Like 'Archive' in Gmail.)
The second idea is that your emails are Bundled by category. This is similar to a tag or a filter, but you can choose to have them still show (as a bundle) in the inbox, rather than being filtered to not-seen oblivion. For example, I had one bundle for Pull Requests, another for Jira notifications. The app auto-categorizers things for Finances, Promos, etc, so many of the spam-like newsletters you get will end up bundled together. (Bundles default to only showing things that are not Done, unless you click a bundle's category on the left navigation bar.)
That doesn't sound very useful. What makes it useful is that you can archive/Done an entire category. All of those emails from TeeFury, Newegg, Amazon, Steam, Github, etc that you would normally consider usually-clutter suddenly are SUPER easy to deal with. It basically makes archiving those no longer annoying, as you can do it all at once. Best of all, you see them first, so it's harder to have something get filtered without being noticed.
Pinning prevents you from archiving an item (unless you explicitly click it). This means that you can ping something in a bundle, archive the bundle, and it will archive all the other things, and leave the bundle with that one item visible.
I am profoundly saddened that Inbox is going away. As others have said, it _changed my life_ in terms of how I dealt with overwhelming email volumes at work.
We didn't just want "most [Inbox] features into gmail". We wanted Inbox's UI and basic approach further developed.
Similar effects can be seen in the OTT market. Roku gets new features from Sling, Netflix and the other OTT players first, with Chromecast and Fire TV lagging by months or years, and these 2nd tier players are missing Amazon Prime Video (Chromecast) or YouTube (Fire TV) respectively. It seems much like the music sales market IMO...
Gmail has `Tasks`, but I'm not aware of it showing up in the same stream as emails.
Bundling is the main development that Inbox brought to the table.
https://gmail.googleblog.com/2014/10/an-inbox-that-works-for...
Three things are highlighted:
Extraction of info from items and display (now in gmail)
Bundles (some made it into gmail)
Reminders, assists, and Snooze (now mostly in gmail)
So i'm not sure i'd agree with you here, but i definitely would agree that of the big three, bundling made it in the least :)
Edit: and the gmail version of bundles has fewer categories than Inbox does
I have all "low priority" emails show up at 5pm when I'm winding down my workday to deal with them.
That's the kind of thing I'm going to miss the most.
Where? “Categories” were in Gmail before Inbox, but there still doesn't seem to be any way to get them bundled in the inbox the way Inbox’s primary display does, though you can set them as separate inboxes.
Gmail’s horribly cluttered interface compared to Inbox, both on web and mobile.
Trips.
Using pinning to effect a simple TODO list.
I think the important point for me is not like "This is a nice to have" or "I don't like extra clicking" it's "This affects my actual health." Literally, it's my health. Not doing this makes people who have mental illnesses like anxiety more unwell.
(Unless you have moved, in which case I'm sorry)
You also seem to believe that more features are always better, but part of Inbox's charm was that it wasn't bloated like Gmail.
I hope I can find something as simplistic and at the same time feature rich somewhere else :(
EDIT: Okay, they are porting bundling to Gmail. I hope they also clean up the UI. The settings dialog is a nightmare to look at.
> By retiring Inbox, is Google losing a valuable ability to experiment with new email functionality in a way that’s tough to do with a billion-user mainstay?
I also agree with this. If Google decided to let Inbox go, same way as with Wave, then the next "email UX experiment" will be another codename. Why not use the existing Inbox product to do the next innovation? Its base is formed by users which already showed adoption to new ideas and UI.
Because the next innovation may be a completely different direction. I much prefer Inbox to Gmail, but I'd be a lot less happy for the Inbox name to be kept but the actual app to replaced by some completely new vision.
> Its base is formed by users which already showed adoption to new ideas and UI.
I bought into Inbox’s specific vision, not the generic idea of novelty. If Inbox didn't work out for Google, I'm disappointed, but I'd rather they kill it openly than that I get force fed some new unrelated novelty approach because I was using Inbox and must therefore be into whatever.
This makes it very difficult for new Google-branded products to gain traction. Especially if the onboarding is costly & discontinuation would hurt a lot (e.g. Google Cloud, Dart, productivity apps, …).
Formal list of products covered under deprecation policy
That way, Google can keep trying things out, early adopters who want them can use them, and the rest of us can keep away. Everyone's happy. Google will stop hurting themselves by developing a reputation that none of their products can be depended on to stick around.
Both your strategy and mine require Google to first be clear about what they want to commit to. Currently, they're not — they just throw things at the wall to see what sticks, but that's hurting their reputation, so they need to do better.