I fear for gmail. I still hurt from google reader being removed. I would have paid £10 a month for google reader had they just asked.
i personally use it as well, i just love the 'dismiss everything' button :)
I use GMail to fetch and filter my main account mails, I don't spread @gmail.com address much, keeping in mind that we will left with closed or transferred service. So I have a plan-B.
At least this is how I see as a long term user: they don't do evil, but removing good is also evilish.
I cannot see myself ever using Inbox. I tried it and I just did not like it.
Personally, I think it would make a lot more sense if there was a clearer separation: emails only showing up in Inbox or Gmail, but not both. Any email that Inbox thinks is/was an actionable "task" should be tagged by Inbox's algorithms as such, and this should hide it from Gmail's default views. Then, you scrub your Inbox for what people want of you—and check your Gmail every once in a while to see what's piled up, but otherwise generally don't worry about it. Gmail would then just contain your non-actionable emails: the stuff where seeing it would never give you an anxiety attack. (It'd still let you do bulk operations to all your messages including the actionable ones, though.)
I think that "messages AI-sorted into separate bins, and then viewed through separate apps, but all in one email database" is actually quite a flexible architecture, and could be taken even further. For one example: email newsletters are another thing that's discrete from regular email†, and has different viewing needs and associated verbs. You could have a Google Reader-like interface that was really just plucking all the newsletters out of your email and displaying them cleverly.
But do note that Gmail would still be there, and still be actively maintained, even if you managed to create fancy abstracted email viewer apps covering the complete gamut of emails people receive. There are many "generic email" tasks that right now only Gmail performs, that Inbox has no plans to add support for: creating filters, adding forwarding accounts, etc. Effectively, Gmail is the "file manager" for your email database, the thing that deals with the unabstracted objects and lets you do maintenance tasks. You can't really throw it away any more than you can throw your file manager away.
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† You know why Google Reader was killed? Because RSS engagement and opt-in and open-rates are much lower than the same metrics concerning email newsletters. Anyone who wanted to make money publishing some regular piece of content cared about these metrics, and so ended up pushing their content as an email newsletter, leaving RSS to be solely the province of amateur personal bloggers. So, more and more, the people with power at Google who cared about consuming content just got it in their email, and generally forgot that RSS was a thing.
(There's a whole rant I could go on here about the fact that RSS was intended to be a supplier-side microformat from the start—a way to ease the burden of syndication to encourage custom blogging software to expose syndicated data—and there was never intended to be such things as "RSS Readers", but rather a much more active ecosystem of plumbing—like, for example, gateways to consume and transform feeds into things like emails. Such plumbing was intended to be employed by the website author, in the same way they'd employ e.g. a reverse-proxy like CloudFlare. RSS was meant to be the internal protocol between the blog and such infrastructure software: like FCGI/WSGI is between web servers and application servers. Picture a world before webhooks, where web servers are dumb and you can't expect to be able to "dial out" a server-side request from your app's crappy VPS; picture the architecture you'd use to hook e.g. Mailgun up to your website in this world. That's RSS.)
No mixed messages here, Google has a penchant of making 2 of everything[1], and they can keep at it for years at a time. ChromeOS & Android, Google Maps and Google Earth (and Waze!), and so on. There is cross-pollination of ideas, and some products eventually coalesce.
> Is 'Inbox' the next-gen Gmail interface or a hobby project
I think the answer is 'neither', just like the iPad wasn't the next-gen MacBook. Inbox is just another email client that is certainly not for everyone, it holds a little too strongly to the inbox zero philosophy to be mainstream.
Having both Inbox and Gmail as separate products makes sense because at their core, Inbox and GMail are different beasts, I use both for different contexts. Inbox is great for organizing my personal email, GMail is great for work email. I wouldn't trust Inbox to properly organize my work email, and I don't have the energy to manually organize my personal email.
1. http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/10/googles-product-stra...
Gmail is a mail client, inbox is so much more.
I don't use it as the ability to only apply a single label to an email is a feature regression.
Chrome and Android will reach feature parity, but will always remain as separate entities due to branding.
Running Android on top of Windows just doesn't sound right, but it is what is effectively happening with Chrome supporting Android apps.
Has it really? I get update notifications literally every day, sometimes multiple times a day, so it seems like development is still very, very active.
> Is 'Inbox' the next-gen Gmail interface
I feel like Inbox and Gmail are separate long-term interfaces working on the same data set that serve completely different sets of users.
But to be fair at my university there are also a lot of students that drive brand new or fairly new cars too and I've parked beside too many Porsches the student parking lot.
Plus, data plans are available everywhere now. For the most part, I use only data. Also, SMS doesn't work when you have to keep switching SIM cards and phone numbers. I can't login to half of my accounts that want to do SMS verification because I registered those accounts using a different SIM card in a different country; I have to wait till I return to those countries before I can login to those accounts and do something about them.
E-mail doesn't have this issue. I've had one e-mail address that has been associated with me for 15+ years that has worked 24/7 internationally. Phone numbers have to practically change every time you step across a country border. Phone numbers are a horrible way to identify me, at least.
* It doesn't show full messages on Android Wear devices. You know, Google's own product. Gmail does.
* I can't figure out how to set up a filter in Inbox. The settings page is incomplete. I still have to go back to Gmail to change settings. So I might as well just use Gmail.
* The pins in Inbox don't sync up with the stars in Gmail. Pins, stars, tabs, automatic Gmail categories, automatic Inbox categories, seriously, can we just have one system?
I'm a huge fan of Inbox, but this still gets me all the time. Inbox was pushed as a kind of advanced application to advanced users, yet I have to go back to Gmail for any kind of advanced settings or configuration. That makes absolutely no sense at all.
If it were still in alpha, i.e. "what do you think of this idea", I would understand that some things are missing and gladly provide my feedback about the concept. But once the concept is verified and being pushed as a kind of "ready for consumer use" beta, it really needs to be complete in features before I would make the switch for real life usage. Especially for a mission-critical product coming from a large company with enough developers.
On past experience - they'll fold the functionality of one into the other - partially and imperfectly leaving users irritated once more.
Still - it's not like I'd be safe from this anywhere else. Products from smaller companies are in constant danger of aquihire shutdowns or similar.
And open-source has still yet to produce UX that's much better than 'parity with the mainstream from a few years ago'.