In October, Google unveiled “Inbox” – an app that smoothly does away with both Google Now launcher and Gmail. With over 500 million user accounts, there’s no doubt that Google is the undisputed king in the email space and releasing this app seemed like a natural move to maintain that position.
“Inbox”, which originates from Google’s traditional email service, stands out among the other email apps, like Mailbox for instance, owing to its stunning design. Animations are pretty and the colours used are bold and bright. Another benefit is that “Inbox” separates ‘real’ and ‘auto-generated’ emails into different colour and icon-coded folders and that’s handy for sorting office emails.
There’s a “Done” group which is similar to “Archive”. The user can even “snooze” the email notification to look into it later. The user can access both these features by pulling out the side-bar menu bar.
A plus (+) sign at the bottom right corner allows users to swiftly compose either an email or a reminder. “Bundles” is an innovative feature that groups similar emails for the user. Then there is “Highlight” which brings real-time updates to the user. This particular feature has caught the eye of companies as it lets them focus on the more important emails by showing them “easy-to-see chips” in “Inbox”.
Although “Inbox” is available for iOS, Android and internet, one needs to get an invite from Google first to be able to login. During the week of the app’s release, Google sent out invites to its tried-and-true contacts to create buzz about their app.