Google's Inbox App To Be Discontinued Next Year

Google has announced that its experimental email app, Inbox, will be discontinued next year. Users of Inbox will have to go back to using regular Gmail, which now comes with some of the same features offered by Inbox.

“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 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.”

When Google launched Inbox in 2014, it was only made available through an invite system. The app primarily focused on viewing emails on smartphones and included features that were not available on the regular Gmail app. Some of the innovations that Google brought to Inbox included notifications based on the sender, Smart Reply and Nudges for providing reminders.

This past April, Google added all of the aforesaid features to the new version of Gmail on the web and on mobile. Gmail now has the same Smart Reply feature that is able to provide contextual suggestions based on the email received. The new Gmail experience also comes with a Smart Compose feature, which is able to write an entire message using machine learning, as pointed out by 9To5Google.

One feature that Gmail still doesn’t have, however, is Bundles. On Inbox, emails can be bundled into one section if they are similar to one another. For example, emails that are specifically for online transactions will be bundled together in a single inbox. Although that’s still not a feature on Gmail, Google did confirm to The Verge that it will be added sometime in the future but no timeline for it has been revealed.

Google has already added a new webpage detailing information on how to easily transition from using Inbox to Gmail. The guide provides Inbox users with information on how to use the same features that they’ve enjoyed on the revamped Gmail experience.

The incoming discontinuation of Inbox shouldn’t be a huge surprise to many since it never achieved mainstream success because it wasn’t being used by a lot of people. However, those who have been using it for the last two years will undoubtedly be disappointed by the news.