One of the key early features of Gmail was the use of labels instead of folders to organize email. Earlier solutions built on a folder methodology for organizing email because it fit into the pre-existing UX for organizing files. On your computer, you organized your files into folders, just like you had organized your pre-digital papers into paper folders. Each file could go into no more than one folder, and each email also could go into no more than one folder.
Gmail changed that paradigm by using labels instead. Each email could have more than one label. An email that was in your inbox wasn’t in your inbox “folder”, it had an inbox label. It could be in your inbox and have additional labels, or none at all, which was the default. Special nomenclature and UI decisions helped to hide the underlying label-driven foundations: removing the Inbox label was called “archiving” an email. Special labels were devised for “Spam” and “Trash”, and searching in the All Mail “folder” (really just a filter) hid emails with the Spam and Trash labels. A special cronjob ran in the background to delete emails with the Spam and Trash labels that were old enough. Gmail allowed users to create rules which could automatically apply labels, and make automatic organizing decisions.
But, most users didn’t use the label paradigm. Using Gmail “properly” – making labels, rules, learning the keyboard shortcuts – had a learning curve that most people didn’t have patience for, if they even knew it existed, since they were often buried in settings menus.
Fast-forward to October 2014, when Google launched an experimental product called Inbox. Users who hadn’t been sorting their emails with labels would still get some of the magic – through machine learning, emails could be classified into one of a few different labels (Social, Updates, Forums, and Promotions), again with some special UI added to hide the underlying labels by calling them “categories” instead. Emails could have both the inbox label, and the Forums label. And while it may have been machine learning that decided whether an email should be given one of the category labels, the form of that machine learning was a hidden rule which automatically applied a label to incoming email.
Now that most users could get the benefits of multiple labels per email with no effort or learning curve, the user response was highly positive. Inbox as a product seemed to be far ahead of its competitors, including Gmail (as a product) itself. So Google started to implement Inbox’s features in Gmail, and now that the feature disparity is gone, Google is about to shut the door on the Inbox product and force all of its users back to Gmail.
If you understand that categories were just automatically-applied labels, then the death of Inbox doesn’t seem like such a tragedy. Instead of applying labels automatically via machine learning, users can just apply labels and come up with rules by themselves, no?
Except that users can’t on mobile, only on desktop Gmail. The Android app does not allow users to manage their labels, nor create or manage rules. There is seemingly no mobile app that exists which allows the user to manage labels and rules from a mobile app.
And that is the real tragedy with Inbox’s death. For most home users dealing with a small amount of relevant email (10-20 emails a day, not including spam), Gmail’s machine-learning-category-labelling-automatic-magic is quite effective. It can be a sufficient tool for organizing email without needing to climb that labels/rules learning curve. As a result, Inbox didn’t need to clutter its UI with tools to manage labels and rules. But ordinary Gmail does require those buttons and controls. They exist in the desktop application, but not in the mobile application.
As a result, the mobile Gmail Android app is little more than a glorified viewport into Gmail. Yes, the user can read and respond to email within the app. The user can view messages by labels, and apply pre-existing ones. But because labels and rules can’t be added, the user shouldn’t remove the Inbox label (“archive”) any emails which the user doesn’t want to forget about without organizing. Without going back to desktop Gmail, “Inbox Zero” becomes a myth. Gmail’s labeling architecture might as well not exist in a mobile-first world.
Google, please make an email app which exposes the full functionality and power of labels and rules. The gap that Inbox’s premature death has left behind demands it.