Gmail - Email by Google Ratings and Reviews

Decent app but occasionally still unreliable

It does do a good job 95% of the time, but when it glitches you don’t know how much you should trust it. One bug that still happening, after many years and many reinstalls is that email read status would be inconsistent across the app. Switch to “Promotions” all read, switch to “Primary” and the same emails you just marked read appears as new and unread. Similarly the counter sometimes out of sync. As if Facebook’s many years long failure to fix notifications caught out the developers at Google too. It is rather disappointing to see such technical prowess fail for so long at something (on the surface at least) such simple. Unfortunately this just makes hard to feel like this app is reliable.

Developer Response ,

Hi there. Could you try uninstalling and then reinstalling the Gmail app itself? If this doesn't help, please visit our Community Forum for any additional assistance: https://goo.gle/3vV3eHZ.

Google: FAIL,

Given that google, generally speaking have a pretty good reputation for ergonomics and aesthetics (although some might disagree if you’re not a fan of brash and bold colours). I’m completely let down by this app, I’ve given it two stars: 1 because it’s free and 1 because I can at least see my email. I took the promo gmail advice, and download the app for a ‘great user experience’ for users of gmail or some such blurb. After doing so and seeing the sleek seemingly simple GUI only to find one of the least capable, extremely frustrating mail apps. You have to know the ‘secret codes’ to do the simplest of actions... like typing ‘label:inbox is:unread’ then perform another 3 equally obscure manoeuvres to just do the simple task of setting all emails to read. Other tasks are equally fiddly and not intuitive at all. I expected more to be honest, given that gmail is an extremely popular email choice. The is the least intuitive I’ve used and other free mail apps offer much more functionality. Woe betide anyone who uses it for corporate or work related mail. Sure it looks great, but is an awful, unusable and simple-to-the-point-of-uselessness app. Google/gmail, dropped the ball with this clunky app. Very disappointed and now, very much deleted!

Unnecessarily complicated

For example, I forwarded an email which bounced back and then I’m no longer able to see the original email correctly, it’s only available in the bounced back format.
I just wish there was an inbox and sent items and it was simple.
It’s unclear how to block nuisance email senders. I’ve tried report email, move to junk email and these don’t seem to work. I still receive emails from the same spammers.
I really hate it if I’m honest! I’m on iPhone and the original email app that came with the phone which I used gmail on worked perfectly but I constantly received pop ups telling me to update it to this complicated app and now I’m stuck with this app and to be frank I just find it impossible to use.
I was receiving emails from an employer who had sent details of a date, time and meeting place for an interview and then a few days before said interview he sent another email requesting confirmation of the interview and because there was now more than one email from the same sender it hid the initial email so I couldn’t find the details of the meeting time! Luckily I had written it down but I shouldn’t have had to do that! The reason I had not deleted the original email was because I wanted to keep it!

Messy ordering of emails, good search function, non compatibility with Apple

Unlike Outlook, email strings are set out in an illogical and very messy way, with latest/drafts often appearing at the bottom of the page. This makes navigating around the app very cumbersome.
On a positive note, the search function is excellent and so much better than Outlook.
Finally, why can’t these egotistical tech companies not work with each other? When using an iPad or iphone, text and images do not retain the same format. For example, copying a block of text from an old email into a new one changes the font size, making the new email look unprofessional. As for adding images from an iPad, this is a joke - the first message sends fine, but when forwarding the email or trying to print the image off the first one, the image expands by a huge amount, so that only a small section can be seen. Pathetic really, given how technology should have moved on by now. Apple/Alphabet, grow up and sort it out for Heaven’s sake!

Glitches & freezes

The app glitches & freezes a lot on iOS. The emails don't load until you refresh the inbox by opening the app. If you have more than 1 email address in the app, you have to manually select each email address to view the inbox, sent, deleted mail boxes attached to the selected email. Rather than having to manually select each individual email address to do so, there should be a way to view all the emails, all sent emails, all the folders attached to each email address. Would be good to have a built in scanner option and option to change font styles. Good thing is the 'unsend' option, but privacy is a huge concern with Google products & services including emails, where it scans your content. I prefer Outlook mailbox, private, no scanning of emails, no glitches, view all emails, folders at once regardless of what email address is selected as the main one, it is very fast, efficient and new emails come in automatically.

Excellent, but... (edit no. 2)

(Edit 2)
*Still can’t open PDFs. No notifications for my google account, notifications for my Microsoft account. I just don’t get it. If I could, I would have my google account also on Outlook, so when I need to I can open PDFs and receive notifications, but because of family sharing restrictions, I cannot. VERY ANNOYING. Please, please ,please can you try and fix this!!*

(Edit No.1)

*Most of my emails contain PDFs and I can’t open them in the Gmail app, I have to go to Outlook. It just says: Name of document, size of document. Please can you fix this as it is annoying, and if I get an important email on the one I can’t put into outlook which has a PDF I need to read in it, how am I supposed to read it? Thanks*

Really good! The only thing I would suggest is that it gives you notifications that appear on the Lock Screen or pop down at the top of the screen, so I know when I have received an email. On the app icon on my Home Screen, it occasionally gives me a red number 1 or 2, but most often than not it doesn’t.
Also, on the computer that I have at home, it allows me to ‘chat’ with my friends through Hangouts, but I can’t access that through Gmail on my phone. I looked and I have to get it as a separate app, which I am not especially pleased about.
If you could try and add these suggestions to the next update, I would be very happy.
Thank you.

Yet another rich tech company with a poor product

Considering how wealthy Google is you’d think their app for one of the most popular tablet brands in the world would be super amazing. Maybe it’s political but this app could be so much better. So many features in the web-based version missing.

The most frustrating is opening emails. I’ve lost count of the number of links in emails I’ve opened, switched momentarily away to another app to find something only to go back to where I was and realised the email link opened in Gmail’s version of a browser and now whatever I was doing has disappeared.

Do these people not employ anyone who understands common use cases? I work for a small tech company and I find it unbelievable that companies with literally billions times more resources can produce something so inferior. If they spent less time sat on bean bags and playing table football and actually performed user research and designed a service from the user up then maybe they would have a better product.

Refreshes too often

The app seems to refresh itself too often now, so when you switch to another app and then come back to it, it usually drops you out of the email you were editing and returns you to the default mail list. Quite irritating and has definitely got worse. I understand it's probably to do with the frequency with which it chooses to sync to the server and the way that's handled. They've got the balance wrong now.

Gmail's font handling is also pants, as it has been forever. Your email looks fine to you in drafting, then you get a reply with your email quoted below, and you see that the fonts were all over the place as it appeared to the recipient. The careful solution is, before sending, select all and choose normal font size. But who has time? It shouldn't be necessary. This happens equally in the web interface, so it's a generic gmail flaw, not app-specific.

Functionality removed

I’ve been using this app for years, in good versions and less good. But, honestly, the latest versions are hopeless.
Google has removed access to the “share” button (the little box with an arrow pointing upwards) that is available in every other major app in iOS. This means you can’t send emails to any other app (e.g. Evernote or Dropbox or your to-do app). It also means you can’t add attachments when sending an email. You can add a picture from your camera app, that’s it. If you want to attach a document or image from anywhere else (e.g. from Evernote or Dropbox again, or OneNote or even Apple’s own Files app on your iOS device). It gives the impression you can attach a document from your Google Drive, but actually it attaches a LINK not the actual document, which is rubbish.
Why would Google hobble its own email app like this? It makes no sense - and it means you have to find an alternative app to use Gmail properly in iOS.
This app is a joke. Google should hang its head in shame at releasing it. (If it knows what shame is.)

Cannot delete old auto fill contacts on app and other issues

I have been able to delete old auto fill contacts via other contacts on the desktop but they keep showing up on the app. I have deleted the app and reinstalled but issue still not resolved. This glitch has been logged on the Google help centre by multiple people but still no response from Google. This issue is a major problem as emails will be sent to wrong email addresses. Please sort this issue asap as people are leaving gmail because of it. This issue is also on my husbands and friends gmail apps

Update new issue - new issue in addition to the above issue which has not been resolved -affecting app only. When you delete emails and delete from trash they reappear after a day. When you look on gmail on a laptop they are not there. Only showing on the app. How is this secure?????

Please fix issues asap.

Developer Response ,

Hi there and thank you for your comment. If your deleted messages keep reappearing in your inbox on the Gmail application, we suggest you give these steps from our help center a try: goo.gle/36NbNrK. Have a grea day !