Are you an Inbox user? Well, bad news for you because Google will be discontinuing it by March 2019.
Back in 2014, the folks at Google responsible for Gmail did something unexpected: They introduced a new email app – Inbox as an innovative new email app that lived alongside Gmail. It brought a ton of new ideas to how email could work, including old standbys like snoozing and newer ideas like bundling. But as a user experience, as then senior VP Sundar Pichai explained in a blog post, Inbox was “designed to focus on what really matters.” It was conceived with mobile devices in mind and ditched a decade’s worth of Gmail cruft in favor of tools focused on email efficiency, such as the way it displayed attachments right in the inbox view and incorporated a built-in task manager.
“Four years after launching Inbox in 2014, we’ve learned a lot about how to make email better-and we’ve taken popular Inbox experiences and added them into Gmail to help more than a billion people get more done with their emails everyday,” Google product manager Matthew Izatt said in a blog post.
“As we look to the future, we want to take a more focused approach that will help us bring the best email experience to everyone. As a result, we’re planning to focus solely on Gmail and say goodbye to Inbox by Gmail at the end of March 2019.”
A lot of the features in Inbox were well-loved, mainly because they were so obviously lacking in Gmail without dealing with hacky third-party solutions. Inbox provided a way to manage the onslaught of email with gestures that made it easy to process messages on the go. It was also generally seen as a potential incubator for new email features that could come to Gmail — though, in practice, Inbox didn’t see enough updates to justify its reputation as a testing ground.
Google says that there are still a few features due to make the migration from Inbox, specifically the “bundles” that group similar emails together into a single block, like those related to a single trip. That’s coming to Gmail, but there’s no word yet on the timeline for it.
So it’s time to switch to the new Gmail interface and say your goodbye to Inbox.