[price]

That was in fact Dropbox's plan circa 2013-2014. (I worked there 2014-2017.) In fact they had email too: Mailbox, a mobile mail client with some brilliant product ideas, which marked the start of the acquisitions spree that included Zulip as well as Hackpad (which became Paper) and many small others.

It didn't work out. Some of the reasons are in this Casey Newton article: https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/8/9873268/why-dropbox-mailb...

[aidenn0]

That article claims that swiping to delete/archive messages debuted in Mailbox, but I recall doing that in 2009 with the Palm Pre's builtin mail app.

[price]

Interesting.

My perception in 2014 was right in line with the way it's told in that 2015 article: that this was a new and clever UI twist, one that I hadn't seen before and that many people in the industry were copying after seeing it in Mailbox. That was as an engineer in San Francisco, talking with designers and product folks and people much more plugged in to industry gossip than me - so I think that means it truly had not previously existed in the mobile apps (really, the iPhone apps) that people here who were connected were paying attention to.

It sounds like Palm had the feature years earlier. Maybe the Mailbox folks got the idea from there! In any case I think they did succeed in bringing the feature to a lot more users, by making it something that people in the industry widely knew about and copied.

[aidenn0]

It's also possible I'm misremembering, but I'm about 90% certain since I remember I would do a pass through my inbox on my phone because of how quick and easy it was to sort this way.

[aidenn0]

Aha, found it[1]. This jogs my memory enough. I changed my "trash" folder to be my archive folder and could just swipe (or as the manual says "Throw the message off the side of the screen").

1: https://manualsdump.com/en/manuals/palm-pre/221591/213

[price]

Interesting! Thanks for tracking down that bit of history.