Stop Being So Unresponsive, Google
Google Search is an engineering prowess and it saves us hours and hours of tedious typing and searching (remember Google Instant launch?). With Now, they know when you need to get in your car if you want to catch your plane — traffic status included. Gosh, they even managed to beat the world’s best player of Go when the consensus was it would take years for machines to master this game.
On the email front, Gmail has close to a billion active users.
All this engineering mastery, all these users, and they *can’t* build a responsive email client.
“Responsive” (it can be a web page or an email) is when the content automatically adjusts itself to the screen it’s displayed on. Typically a computer screen is large and wider than it is tall. A smartphone is not very large, and taller than it is wide. As such, a multi-column layout might work well on a desktop, but a single-column one is more appropriate on mobile.
What does it mean for the user? It means if you use Google’s Inbox app on your iPhone (for instance), emails can be very hard to read. They might look something like this:
Whereas in Apple’s default, Mail app, it’s like this:
Why Oh Why, Google?
I don’t know the answer. I doubt it’s technical (many clients are doing it) so I guess it’s philosophical or something. But please, Google, don’t take us back to the dark days of Internet Explorer’s incompatibilities.
If you think this article is interesting, please don’t hesitate to “Recommend” it with the little green heart button below. More people will see it… maybe even — who knows? — Google! Thanks ;-).
NB: yes, I know some developers will say there are *hacks* that *should* work to get *some-kind-of* responsiveness in Gmail. But please, do we really want to spend hours fixing something that’s — frankly — broken? I’d rather work on making my products better…
