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Google is discontinuing Inbox

fastcompany.com

61–70 of 459 posts

Re: Google is discontinuing Inbox

#61
Does Gmail have any features like Inbox's groupings for Trips?

I have a lot of emails grouped together into a Trip, which Inbox helpfully shows a card summary for (including flights and reservations).

Re: Google is discontinuing Inbox

#62
I still deeply miss Mailbox (the cross platform app bought and abandoned by Dropbox). It was SO fast and sleek. Emails appeared damn near instantly, the app never lagged, and actions taken locally were reflected remotely near instantaneously.

Email clients are a lot better now than then. In fact the best features of Mailbox (swipe to /action/ and snoozing) has been copied by basically every email client now. However, I have yet to find an email app for either macOS or iOS that's as consistently fast.

Re: Google is discontinuing Inbox

#63
post #57
post #56

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 app…

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.

https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation

Formal list of products covered under deprecation policy

Re: Google is discontinuing Inbox

#64
> Outside of some of the bundling features

Bundling (in the inbox) is THE reason for using Inbox. It's the only unique feature. It's the thing that changed how I use email.

If I use folders it's the kiss of death for any email that a rule sends to that folder. I want a single list but with some items collapsed.

Email went from unthreaded to threaded (reducing the complexity massively.

Bundles takes that one step further.

In both cases the critical thing is one ordered list but with a massively reduced number of individual items.

Re: Google is discontinuing Inbox

#65

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.

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.

Re: Google is discontinuing Inbox

#67
post #5

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. What's the point?

Uh, most useful features of Inbox have made it into GMail at this 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.

> Uh, most useful features of Inbox have made it into GMail at this point.

Inbox’s basic organization hasn't, and that's it's key useful feature and the one most of the rest build on.

Re: Google is discontinuing Inbox

#68
Side-note on Google's communication systems, I watch an email thread at work where it went:

    1) Here are my questions
    2) I've added responses below in BLUE
    3) Additional feedback in GREEN
    4) More responses in BROWN
and it really made me miss Google Wave. Inline replies within long emails are not well handled.

Re: Google is discontinuing Inbox

#70
This is so bad for my productivity. I will be missing:

- Reminders (with the ability to snooze them)

- Inbox bundling for promo, social, trips etc.

- Pinning and archiving everything that is not pinned

- Android 'Add reminder' widget

Any ideas on how to replace these are welcome

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