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by glassofbees 3020 days ago
I use a combination of Gmail on the desktop and Inbox on a phone. I tried to use Inbox on desktop for a while, but ended up switching back as the desktop version of Inbox was too dumbed down and controlling for my liking:

- The mobile app arbitrarily doesn't allow labelling something and keeping it in the inbox.

- It puts emails in the inbox under a folder when labelled by a filter, which usually ends obscuring important messages.

- It doesn't have something equivalent to inbox sections (I use the crap out of these as my inbox has multiple different streams of things to action in it from multiple email aliases - personal, business, opensource, travel, bills, etc).

- As others have mentioned, Inbox is not very information dense.

Google sure had a challenge updating Gmail, since there's so many people using it in different ways. It'd be really interesting to see their top usage patterns summarised.

3 comments

I love Inbox on mobile but I stopped using it on Desktop because it was so slow (sluggish). I have top of the line systems and it still felt so sluggish. Don't have that problem on the app.
Update: disappointment - priority inbox sections haven't been updated. They're still limited to 2 by the UI, and the new UI still doesn't expose "with label, in inbox" that's been possible for years by modifying the HTML on the page. The Gmail server clearly supports this, so it's a shame they haven't implemented a UI for it. I hope this doesn't break the hack people have been using to get 4 sections with messages only from the inbox...
I've done the exact same thing. Inbox was nice on-the-go, Gmail is nice on the desktop.