iOS comes with a mail client. It connects to my exchange, gmail and Zoho accounts.

You don’t install gmail, you connect a mail client to it or visit it in a web browser.

This is obviously better, but until just now it never occurred to me that this would be the way iOS users would engage with gmail, since I've only ever used Android. I always thought the iOS built-in email app was just for Apple mail or something.

TIL. We really do live in separate bubbles.

And a great email client at that. Both iOS and macOS's. I can't imagine trading it for some web UI.

“Great” isn’t how I would describe it. Searching for “delivery” from my inbox, when the third email in my inbox has a literal subject line of “delivery notification”? Zero results.

It’s great if you never search for email I guess.

It used to break the search index sometimes, but I experienced it twice at most, and it searches instantly for me, never failed to find an e-mail I was looking for...

...from 5 accounts with at least a decade of history each, incl. my office e-mail.

The problem is the actual architecture Apple uses for search in iOS and macOS. Spotlight powers all of it, and it applications like Mail that need search, do so by donating data to spotlight for indexing.

But that means any spotlight bug is a mail search bug, and a settings search bug, and a “just launch this app” search bug, etc etc etc.

It also means that any bugs caused by one of these applications end up affecting them all. So if Contacts causes an indexer crash, none of your searches anywhere work any more. It’s a super fragile architecture. They did some work to split some of the plugins into separate processes but somehow it always ends up being insufficient.

At least on macOS there are some commands to blow away your spotlight index when it goes bad. On iOS you’re basically screwed unless you wipe and restore the OS.

There’s another nasty one I encountered where power loss on a mac mini with 4 external drives connected made one drive refuse to mount on that machine. All recommendations online were to nuke the OS and/or drive to get it to mount there again. It would mount on other machines fine. There’s some cache/index file buried (I think related to spotlight) that got corrupted. Nuked that file, drive mounted instantly again.

These types of things should stand as big massive red flashing warnings with all these locked down systems - as you point out, in certain situations on iOS you’re just stuffed.

The worst is that if you look at Console.app and stream error logs from the system processes, there's hundreds of error logs per minute being dumped out on a brand new system with nothing installed on it yet, including and especially from spotlight. There's bugs all over the place that some engineer at Apple thought enough to emit a log for, and the result is they just ship with the errors anyway. They only seem to care about 100% reproducible bugs, and even then they sometimes ship with them anyway. They don't seem to care about all these little unobservable issues that "only" log errors, even though 9 times out of 10, when a bug does become a reproducible/observable issue, there was an error log that was warning you about it the whole time.

If I took over Apple's software engineering, I would tell every engineer "None of you are working on features until a stock OS install has zero error/warning logs. No exceptions. Contribute to fixes or use your vacation time, but nobody touches anything until we get it all fixed. Then once that's done, nobody's allowed to work on features while there are open bugs in their backlog. No exceptions."

Totally agree. I hit another crazy iOS bug this morning I hadn't hit for a few months - search for an old email - specifically my old Ableton licence from 2022... Return to my inbox 20-30 mins later on that device and it's now full with every email returned from my earlier Ableton search. Open my email on any other machine (MacBook, iPad, etc.) and it shows correctly, but iOS will keep showing all those old emails until I manually move each one back to its original folder. Pretty annoying if they come from different folders, and deleting them deletes the original in the email account. Persists across reboots, so again clearly spotlight search borks out and wrecks the local mail index. It needs a "rebuild" button, like Mac Mail has to "solve" this.

When I open Gmail, whether an app or on the web, it already has the latest emails loaded. When I open Mail.app, I have to wait for them to download.

This is why Gmail is nicer in many areas.

> Do people have to install Gmail on iOS?

Why would Gmail be pre-installed on iOS?

They aren't sure, that's why they are asking..

Thank goodness, Gmail does not come on iOS. No other apps are pre installed except Apple's, and I am always very thankful for that when I set up a Samsung tablet as a kiosk and have to delete sponsored apps, AI apps, Spotify, Microsoft apps, Samsung apps, Google apps, kids apps...horrible experience.

The Apple Mail client works very well with Gmail. The only real negative is that it’s not true push email, though it is largely close enough.

The thing I miss most about macOS now that I’ve gone all-in on Linux is actually Apple Mail. It’s just a simple and clean Mail app.

My current choice is Evolution and I’ve had very good luck with it so far. But ultimately the best Mail experience is on my iPhone.

I was using Thunderbird/BetterBird, but now that a Windows client isn’t a requirement for me anymore, I much prefer Evolution. Thunderbird is a notable pain when it comes to an inability to reliably export/import your user profile to other machines. It’s also such a cluttered application and I find the calendar UI to be horrendous. Good luck using a trackpad to scroll through months of the year.

If your concern is just having access to your emails if someday shit hits the fan and you’re locked out, why no smtp ? Seems easier.

SMTP is to send mail and that's how I send it from my laptop and from my phone. POP3 is to read from a mailbox.

Or imap !

IMAP usually means that mail is stored on the provider server even if one can download and delete. Furthermore POP3 is a trivial protocol that could be operated via telnet before everybody went TLS.

The real reason I'm still using POP3 is that I'm using the mailboxes that are bundled with my domains. One on the registrars announced IMAP support a few days ago. All the others are still on POP3 probably because POP3 servers have been available since forever.

Thanks. I meant IMAP