Does Gmail want to be instant messaging? New UI experiment says “yes”

not like Google has already tried and abandoned several instant messaging options over the years or anything …

At this point they could pay me per message and I wouldn't use it. I'm not goign to convince people to move just to be rug pulled again.
- Move to an open, safe, user-respecting option like signal. Fuck using Google stuff for more than just this reason.
Instant Messaging, in particular, has been a series of failures of both vision and design by Google.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/
- The golden opportunity was when Hangouts was the default SMS app on Android. The same technique has been very successful for Apple.

Again...?

Seventh time's the charm.
I'm so confident that Google is just reskinning the same messaging app
- it's not even IM this time, it's just email with a different input

Yes that's what Google needs. Another messenger service.

"Apple, please 😢, adopt rcs. We failed at our messaging apps😭now we need your help. EU, please tell apple to open up imessage 😟. It's so unfair. If you don't we'll add instant messaging to Gmail"

Most miserable company ever.
- What does this have anything to do with RCS?

2 months later…

This week in technology, Google abandons yet another project. 🤷🏻‍♂️

This and many other reasons not to use their products. I think more people would appreciate paying $5 or so a month for email that works without ads or invasions of privacy, in addition to avoiding the constant adjustments to Google-style ****ery.

finallly what google has been missing, an instant messenger application/protocol.

thanks google for really finding a gap and filling a need.

Google Talk flashbacks anyone?

Google Talk, Google Chat, Google Huddle... Some of them even integrated with Gmail.

Seems like a dumb idea to try again, when already established chat systems that won't vanish in a year exist.
- Also Allo, I used to use that app, it was very clean, but no one I talked to heard of it
- No love for Google Wave?
- Hangouts still works. I believe it's their longest running chat app.
The story’s older than that:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/
Google Wave?

I'm so fucking tired of companies trying to "innovative." Just give me my shitty government provided email service already so I can ignore it like I do snail mail

Another potential to the google graveyard.

Gmail is a part of Google's subscription plan. It won't.

They don’t even have a desktop app for gmail chat. Whatever they do, they’ll abandon.

No way I'm using a new Google product ever again

Just what a successful Google service needs, to be associated with the failure that is their messaging platform attempts.

This is a feature available in outlook desktop application at least for Mac

The irony is of course that Gmail did used to be essentially an instant messenger until Google decided in their wisdom that on Android you should not be notified immediately you receive a message

Will they succeed in making even Gmail fail?
I can already see memes with the Gmail icon and the obvious "task failed successfully"

You can react to emails with emoji right now. At least on Android.

Which at first I thought "thAts fucking dumb"

But now I can react 👍 instead of sending stupid, loathsome 'Thanks!' emails.

But what happens if someone sends you an email from a non-gmail account? Can you react then?

If so, does it just reply to this email with an emoji in the body? Cause then you're basically just replying in the exact way as before, google just added a quick-reply button with a predefined body.

I'm personally not a fan of nonstandard functionality for something as ubiquitous as email. Email should be exactly the same regardless of the client that's used.
- They get an email that says "foggy@gmail reacted to your email with 👍"

Assuming this is aimed at business use: good, but too little too late.

Tacking on chat features isn't going to bring businesses back from Slack and Teams. The ship has sailed. Email exists as a lowest common denominator and a way for lead generators to harass people who don't actually make procurement decisions.

Email won't die but it's on indefinite LTS.

hahah thats exactly what this is. they got caught with their pants down on slack and now theyll never get market share.
- The bit that kills me is that “make Google Chat not suck” doesn’t seem to be in the list of options for addressing this problem at all. I work for a company that uses GSuite and chat is universally loathed with a bunch of Slack instances running around the company, both sanctioned and unsanctioned. If they spent time working to improve chat, the momentum of being a GSuite company would carry the rest of the weight here. It doesn’t have to be better than Slack, just closer.
- or they're trying to turn (g)mail into a shitty, high-latency, unreliable alternative to imessage.
What do you mean email is on life support?
- I mean that it's no longer actively being improved as a competitor to other forms of communication. Chat has taken over the world in both personal and business settings.
  
  It's not going to die because it's the de facto default when nothing else is available, but it's also not going to rise up and compete with modern chat solutions which are already ten times as feature rich and continuing to evolve.

XMPP/Jabber says hello. Remember how they used it but didn't want to allow you to use another Jabber client?

They won't support markdown for another 10 years and invent their own thing

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Last month the popular webmail app shipped an emoji reactions bar in the mobile app, where a single tap would send a new email with your emoji response.

Now, a wild new UI experiment spotted by Android Police goes another step further: a quick reply bar that looks just like instant messaging input.

Rather than the usual input block you get for writing paragraphs of overly formal text, this new Gmail experiment has a one-line input bar at the bottom for replies.

An "expand" button will presumably launch the usual compose interface.

So far, this seems to be an extremely rare test that only one person has gotten, so it will not necessarily roll out to everyone.

Given the recent emoji launch, though, Gmail certainly seems jealous of its instant-messaging cousins.

The original article contains 171 words, the summary contains 131 words. Saved 23%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

What's the problem with that? You can reply to any mail at your convenient time. It is not a telephone call.

The only reason I use Gmail at this point is because it's the only Android email client that has an actually nice, modern looking UI, other apps like K9 mail don't really look as nice as it.

It's annoying how they try to integrate Google chat into the app as well.

anyone remember googles inbox app? now that was basically perfect and had no ads but they killed it
I know it might not look very modern but K9 mail is the most clutter free no bs email client I've ever used.

So… deltachat?