[ocdtrekkie]

It's ironic, but Google's monopoly was already well in abuse when Windows Phone was around, and being used to block Google's competitors. Gmail required you enable "less secure apps" to let a Windows Phone connect to it and they continually blocked Windows Phone from having any access to YouTube as well. Even when Microsoft invested their own development resources in building support for Google's already monopoly-scale platforms, Google would just find excuses to block them.

[Wowfunhappy]

> Gmail required you enable "less secure apps" to let a Windows Phone connect to it

Wait, what was that about? Microsoft was incapable of building a Windows Phone email client that used OAUTH?

[ocdtrekkie]

I believe Gmail switched at that time to pushing you to use effectively a Gmail-proprietary method to authorize access to a Gmail account. Nobody else was doing it at the time, I think official OAuth scopes actually came later.

And bear in mind, OAuth to authorize mail access is weird. Generally speaking, mail clients use IMAP or POP3 and SMTP. One of the more popular open source Android mail clients, K-9 mail, still doesn't support it: https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/655

But the biggest issue is that, like the "unknown sources" checkbox in Android, Google uses scare tactics to discourage non-Google-proprietary apps and protocols. Use Google apps on Google devices only, otherwise you'll have to authorize "less secure" things.

[dwighttk]

Hmm I’ve been using gmail via IMAP almost exclusively for about 10 years