I'm not sure what how Gmail is particularly locked-down compared to any other app. I'm not an Android developer, but it seems like there's not really a great way to add functionality to an app as a third party. If you want an app that does those things, you can still connect it with a Gmail account. In fact, there are many apps designed to connect with Gmail and add new features.

Android is designed from the ground up to enable this kind of thing. It has a powerful cross-app Intent system that could allow sharing of emails, deeplinking into gmail, broadcasting email changes, allow other apps to change email status, etc.

From the programming and functionality perspective that's fantastic. From the data security perspective that's a nightmare.

I don't think androids intent system has any large security implications (I think it has had some but in general). But what I find more interesting/suprising how often I read about these types of concerns given that desktop operating systems provide very limited protection in this area e.g firefox can read all my emails since thunderbird and firefox are run as the same user.

Well, on one hand, mobile operating systems like iOS were designed to be a big step up from the security perspective; android was born more like a desktop operating system scaled down to mobile but has progressively increasing security isolating apps more and more within their sandbox with less options to run in background, hook into the general user experience of the system, and manage things that they don’t belong to them.

On the other hand, your example is wrong on macOS where apple mail and safari are sandboxed. So desktop operating systems are trying to catch up security wise and go beyond the traditional Unix security model.

I think the concerns come from the side of people (legal and real) that want to store data and perform computation on other people's devices without the owner being able to control things.

What do I mean by this? Anyone with a 'private' API, anyone who's business model involves DRM and anyone who thinks that a remote wipe of an unwilling device should be possible.

The way Intents are designed it's really not.

I think the problem is, fundamentally, lock-in is often a lucrative strategy, open isn't. The internet is "accidentally" open, when it comes to protocols like SMTP, HTTP, etc, I think primarily because it was more of an research/educational network. The commercial enterprises (AOL, CompuServe) were proprietary and walled off.

Looks like the old Microsoft embrace extend extinguish to me.

Those actions are on the e-mail sender to implement; GMail has an open specification for an e-mail to provide a structured representation of data it contains.

https://gsuite-developers.googleblog.com/2013/05/introducing...

Right, a corporate spammer can tell google that an email is a calendar event (valuable data!). But the receiving user can't do it themselves using some other calendar app.

In android's intents model it's the email app so that would need to use the create event intent to send the data to the calendar.

To do this the calendar would need to access the emails - which would need either IMAP built in to the calendar app [EDIT: or to change the android permission model].

Edited - finished sentence

I believe the idea is (or was) that the e-mail app will use a "content provider" component[1] to give other apps access to data as appropriate.

[1] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/content...

The point of this structured data format is that you don't need to give the calendar app fill access to the email; just to the attached calendar info included in the email, which can be attached to the intent.

You can't even have an HTML signature on Gmail for Android.

Something so trivial missing from Google's main email client.

To provide a counterpoint, I think it's great the way it is in this respect.

I don't want any of these features and wouldn't want others to use things like HTML signatures.

I agree, a few less signatures in the world isn't a bad thing.

Would be nice to be able to configure different (plain text) signatures for my different email addresses though.

You are the exception, not the rule.

> You can't even have an HTML signature on Gmail for Android.

Do not know for android but next sentence is true

You can have an HTML signature on Gmail for IOS.

Basically you setup html signature on web desktop client, then send email through mobile app without signature and gmail does the rest (fetch your hmtl signature)

What bugs me the most is offline use. If you have unreliable network coverage, like I do everyday in the subway, the damn thing tries to connect for every action and then just become unresponsive if the connection fails. You have to activate airplane mode so it'll know not to try to access the network.

I'm going to use this space to complain that there's still not a way to delete single messages on Android instead of the whole thread. This is possible on the web, and I've been asking Gmail for this simple function for years, yet they continue to avoid adding it in.

Just curious, why would you delete a message on a thread?

Here is my Gmail on Android workflow: I swipe to right and archive the thread after I read the thread. It goes away from my inbox. Once someone adds a new mail to the chain thread re appears in my mailbox. I read it and archive it again. I rarely delete a mail.

Useless side conversations that spun off from the original email. Or even worse, when gmail smashes a message in there that doesn't belong in the thread at all.

Someone emails sensitive material that you don't want persisted (e.g a password) in your account. Yes it may keep being persisted somewhere else due to the nature of email but hey, it very much depends on your threat model, you don't control what the sender decides to send anyway, and you can do a best effort for it not to become a liability on you.

Sometimes mail bounces. I liked to delete those messages off the thread.

I find that using Gmail with mailing more than X people is impossible because the replies all get mushed together. I now change the subject line for individual replies so I don't get lost.

What?!? I do it all the time, just a simple swipe left and it is deleted.

You just need to change the default from archive to delete on the settings panel.

Read what I said carefully. Individual messages, not threads.

You got a point, sorry about that, I should have paid proper attention.

So why not just use another email client besides Gmail? And when you find one you like you can even set it as your default email client.

Does Outlook on mobile provide these?

Iirc desktop outlook could create events/reminders/tasks linked to emails in your inbox.

Yes! (I'm the dev who implemented them in Outlook Mobile). I think you are thinking of COM add-ins though, which were significantly more powerful, but a security risk. The new JS based approach, which has been in place for a few years, can't do quite as much, but is much much safer.

google doesn't hate open, they give us a lot of quality free / open source software. being who they are, they also make proprietary products. I'd take a world with google's contributions to foss than one without.

Have you tried inbox?

It works OK if you are willing to submit to their new paradigm, but some people like a traditional inbox. Try Aquamail for instance. It's what gmail would be if it worked properly.

Seconding Aquamail, by far the best email client I've used for Android.

Just Like Java (TM)? Google is the new Sun Microsystems?

Except Google figured out how to monetize the success. I knew it was bad when the JRE install started asking if I wanted to install search bars in my browser.

I think, per Zero to One, Thiel (for one) would argue otherwise. Take away search (read: ads on SERPs) and Google is close to an average, if not subpar, "success story."

Take away the iPhone and Apple is a failing computer manufacturer. Take away Windows and Microsoft is a mediocre console maker and makes Office. So?

Read Zero to One. It'll explain the situation better than I can in a tiny textbox :)

The worst thing about Gmail on Android for me is that it doesn't deliver mails reliably. Sometimes when I open the web client on my computer I'm greeted by a list of unread emails, and almost immediately my phone fires of the notification for new mail, even though some of them can be several days old. This indicates that it's Google's servers that isn't sending the notification to my phone when mail arrives, but I consider them to be part of the same system and don't really care where the failure is.

Does anybody else have problems with mails not being delivered to their phones until hours or days after they've arrived in the inbox?

This sounds like a push/background data issue, where refreshing forces the phone to update.

I haven't had this issue since my OG HTC EVO, but toggling Sync on an account basis in the app could help.

There was also a catastrophic bug in both Gmail and Inbox about a month ago where emails wouldn't notify, might be worth an update if you haven't in a while.