Of course, just a few days after I blogged about one little feature of Inbox that I really like (reminders, particularly on iOS), it is announced that Inbox will be shut down in March 2019.
I saw a good amount of sadness/frustration of it, but nowhere near the blowback I thought I’d see. No petitions to keep it open or bizarre threats (there probably are some, but none have crossed my path naturally). I wonder if that’s because people care, but not like I’m moving to Canada care about an email client. Nothing like what Google Reader saw. People still talk about that one.
Bad timing for power-user email people, as the also seemingly-beloved Newton is shutting down at the end of September 2019. Part of me wishes I could have gotten to try Newton anyway. With user quotes like: If you’re buried in email and want to get your life back, use Newton, plus the fact they charged 10 bucks a month for it so were strongly incentivized to make it awesome, sounds good to me. Founder Rohit Nadhani straight up said the competition from free apps is just too stiff.
There is even the other Google product, Google Keep, that I hear people quite like and appeals to me in some ways, but I’m not even going to bother to try it since I just don’t trust little things that feel like playground test apps for Google are going to stick around. They won’t.
One response to “No More Inbox”
I’ve grown to like Google Keep but I have the same paranoia about it being killed off one day. The only thing that gives me hope for Google Keep is that they’d designated it as a core service of G Suite. By default, Inbox wasn’t even allowed on my G Suite account; I had to manually turn it on in a manner that made it seem like they almost didn’t want it being used. Keep is being actively developed (which admittedly doesn’t mean much because Inbox and Google Reader saw years of active development.) But Google is also marketing Keep to their customers paying for G Suite. I went and looked and Google has never retired any of those core G Suite services. Given that I have moved a large amount of data into my Keep, I hope it stays that way!