there’s no Such thing As a wonderfully Designed email App (and that’s ok)

“no one desires to run two e mail shoppers,” Javier Soltero tells me. “no person sane, anyway.” Soltero must understand—he’s the final manager of Microsoft Outlook, one of the crucial widespread e mail apps in the world. He additionally co-based Acompli, a mobile e mail startup that became an rapid tech-world darling in 2014 prior to getting got by using Microsoft (and rebranded as Outlook cellular) lower than a year later.

Soltero desires his email app to be your simplest e mail app. Erik Lucas, founding father of Geronimo—every other mobile email app that launched in August—needs the same thing. Geronimo couldn’t be more completely different: the place Outlook’s design is formal and no-nonsense, Geronimo is deliberately quirky and videogame-like, full of unfamiliar gestural interactions and easter egg features. Lucas describes his app as an “modern experience” inspired by means of actual-world physics, not merely a messaging software.

In between these two extremes lie dozens of alternative e mail shoppers—Inbox, Mailbox, Hop, Boxer, simply to call a couple of—they usually all need what Soltero and Lucas want: One email app to rule all of them. Reviewers make the same assumption whenever they render judgments about the “easiest” e-mail app for this or that platform. And if one is the perfect, why would any individual ever need to settle for the others?

however what if Soltero is flawed—what if it isn’t insane anymore to need, need, and in fact run more than one e-mail app? Or, for that subject, multiple images app or calendar app?

sarcastically, Soltero may agree. “which you could’t please everyone. you have to have a point of view,” he says. Outlook itself has even launched an alternative cellular email app known as send. So is he endorsing his personal breed of so-called madness?

now not actually. What Outlook, Geronimo, or some other e mail client in point of fact offers now is just what Soltero described—a perspective, a particular filter on a stable corpus of non-public knowledge. In other words, contemporary electronic mail apps are like Instagram filters to your inbox. Now that the cost of adding or altering these filters methods zero—in other words, when it’s trivial to put in and invoke different apps that interface along with your Gmail account in distinct methods, like results on an Instagram photograph—why shouldn’t customers provide themselves more than one options?

Adopting this stance toward e-mail apps totally modifications how one evaluates the design of any explicit app. Take Geronimo, as an example: its physics-based totally UI metaphor basically reimagines your e mail messages as little Lego blocks that you can snatch, stack, toss, and type like tangible objects. The hardware will get roped in, too: tipping, twisting, or flicking the iPhone in numerous guidelines motives Geronimo’s interface components to behave like issues subject to gravity and friction.

quite frankly, Geronimo is strange. And if I were drawing near it with an angle of “may this be my one-and-handiest electronic mail app?” I’d have to assert no. however taking into consideration it as an “Instagram filter” for my electronic mail adjustments things. Does it add anything meaningful to the other “filters” I already use? Or might it, in some context I haven’t encountered yet? certain, maybe. Why not preserve it? Or now not. after all, if I ever do to find myself in a state of affairs where I want that I might deal with my e mail messages as toylike “bricks,” Geronimo is only some faucets away within the App store.

same for Outlook cell. Or Hop. Or whatever neat new e mail shopper will get invented next week. convey ‘em on! There’s room on my phone (and my iPad, and my computer) for everybody.

as it turns out, treating e-mail apps as contextual, hot-swappable “filters” is damned liberating. overlook just two: now i take advantage of half of a dozen. On my computer I tab multiple times a day between Gmail Inbox (for triaging incoming stuff) and Gmail “classic” (which is healthier for energy-querying my years-lengthy e mail archive like a database). On my telephone i exploit iA creator (a text editor that hooks up to iOS’s default Mail app) to push emails out with out letting any in (this retains me from checking my phone often). In a pinch, or if I’m super lazy, I’ll just use iMessage to ping somebody’s email tackle. And i exploit Outlook’s all-in-one command middle on my iPad, in order that once I’m commuting to and from work on the bus i will be able to get serious e mail “work” done without lugging my Macbook pro.

inside this regime, the more “opinionated” an e mail app’s design is—to use Soltero’s phrase—the more seemingly i am to believe making an attempt or retaining it, if just for an awfully explicit use case. I don’t must love it, and it’s no longer like my other apps will get jealous. Or maybe they’re going to—who knows, possibly Soltero, Lucas, et. al. are bummed out to listen to that I’m now not monogamous with their respective apps. but who cares? As an notorious slide deck from the advert company Wieden + Kennedy as soon as remarked, seventy two% of Pepsi drinkers also drink Coca-Cola.

The upside for users of those apps is that whereas there will never be one excellent e mail app, there doesn’t have to be: one of the best e mail app to your desires in some specific context probably exists already. The upside for designers is much less clear, seeing that (as Geronimo’s Erik Lucas advised me) creating a purposeful email client from scratch is a decidedly non-trivial endeavor. however then again, he and Soltero have aimed their design efforts at the “large problems” with electronic mail. Outlook (née Acompli) wanted to make electronic mail on a phone as power-featured and endeavor-prepared as electronic mail on an IT-issued computer. Geronimo wished to make e-mail on a telephone less, smartly, predictable. but what if somebody simply wanted to design a easy, single-task-centered UI to wrap over somebody’s electronic mail account for a selected context—similar to the best way that textual content editors appear to spring up with the aid of the dozens to swimsuit each conceivable non-public whim and area of interest?

I’m no engineer, in order that could be an apples to oranges comparability. however the point is that there’s no solution to win at electronic mail, so why design the apps as if there have been? I used to roll my eyes at each new try to repair electronic mail—really, any other one?—however now I sit up for them. So what if Geronimo doesn’t make experience to me? It does for any individual, someplace. You do you, e mail app designers, and i’ll just maintain playing the field. all and sundry wins.