Gmail - Email by Google 4+

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!