Inbox was the best email experience I've ever used.
They claimed that everything you like about Inbox has been integrated into Gmail, but it just isn't the same. All of your email categories/bundles were on the landing page. It was super intuitive to click into them and dig down into the hierarchy, and to go back/up a level on any screen you just scrolled to the top or bottom of a screen and overscroll (like a pull-to-refresh type move). I didn't have to pull out drawers or actively jump between categories. It was perfect.
Now with Gmail I have to click into my email categories one-by-one to see what's in each of them. It doesn't do the automatic bundling. And GOD the ads! Which there are not only way too many of, but they're constantly asking me if I find them useful or not. Of course I don't find them useful, I'm trying to check my email.
The decision to get rid of Inbox smells like a lot of office politics. Someone probably create Inbox as a fun new 20% project and then it took off with a massive customer base that was eating into Gmail's metrics and so they decided to kill it.
Literally the opposite is true. Inbox had a huge team (bigger than Gmail) and while it was loved a lot by some, it never gained much traction among the regular Gmail users, and it'd have been impossible to migrate the enormous Gmail customer base over.
I think for people who take email seriously (e.g. have work or volunteering commitments) and don’t just use it as a receipt holder, the Inbox concept is horrifying.
Most of the good features are already baked into GMail and Outlook already. The extreme white space Material Design look is already way out of date.
The key feature of having AI monkey with the inbox is a non-starter if you might face consequences for the AI getting it wrong. Even something as basic as Focused Inbox in Outlook causes problems and it’s only got two categories. The base gmail experience is super bad at its own implementation of categorized mailbox.
I know! Inbox was by far the best productivity software I've ever used. I was an eng manager during the time it was available, which meant I basically lived in email. I feel like I was 2x as productive because of that one tool.
Inbox was a data-gathering nightmare for our 3-Letter spy orgs.
Inbox wasn't killed for lack of users.
Hangouts, Inbox, and most of Google's prior messaging platforms were terminated due to lack of centralized data-gathering of the most important data sets.
They claimed that everything you like about Inbox has been integrated into Gmail, but it just isn't the same. All of your email categories/bundles were on the landing page. It was super intuitive to click into them and dig down into the hierarchy, and to go back/up a level on any screen you just scrolled to the top or bottom of a screen and overscroll (like a pull-to-refresh type move). I didn't have to pull out drawers or actively jump between categories. It was perfect.
Now with Gmail I have to click into my email categories one-by-one to see what's in each of them. It doesn't do the automatic bundling. And GOD the ads! Which there are not only way too many of, but they're constantly asking me if I find them useful or not. Of course I don't find them useful, I'm trying to check my email.