[finnh]

where? i just went through Settings > Apps > Gmail on my iphone and found nothing about this. Likewise the in-app Settings in the GMail app lets you choose which browser is the "default app" but it's already set to Safari (the other options are Chrome, by Google, and ... Google, by Google). But that uses an embedded Safari instance inside gmail, not the phone's Safari app.

[philsnow]

To get what you want (links open in Safari.app, not the safari webview inside Gmail): configure your default browser in Settings (your iphone settings, not gmail's settings) to be Safari, and then in Gmail choose "Default browser app" instead of Safari.

It's super vague and unclear why things should work this way, and I don't know if this is forced on them by iOS or what. I'm trying to think of why choosing "Safari" in the gmail settings would use the webview instead of the app, and the most-charitable reason I can think of is that they don't want to contribute to the person having hundreds of Safari tabs open...?

Less-charitable reasons might include wanting to keep users in the gmail app for driving "engagement". I read somewhere that when apps use the in-app webview, the app dev can inject arbitrary javascript and thus has full control and can see keystrokes, what the webview's viewport is looking at, etc. I really don't think that's what google is trying to do here, though.

[finnh]

Wow - i even saw the words "default browser app" and did not even realize it was a setting choice. That works - thank you!

wrt reason : I think that the webview has cookie isolation from the actual app, so using the webview is a bit more privacy-protective. Google being Google that seems unlikely to be the motivating reason, but who knows what good may lurk in the heart of men...