• by Andy Thorpe , March 6, 2015

Historically, Android has shipped a native email app that various manufacturers have tweaked or not. On many occasions the app has rendered responsively, but it has not been consistent across devices.

Still, the Gmail app tends to be used by more people. This does not render responsive emails and instead tends to simply zoom out the desktop version to fit it into the screen width, unless some very clever coding is used.

Gmail recently released its Inbox app, with a focus on consumers who receive far more emails than they send. It is a very different experience from the Gmail app, whose popularity is fading from its original invitation-only release. The Inbox app has the same rendering engine as the Gmail app, so is also not responsive.

Google has since announced that future Android versions will not carry a native app and everyone will get the Gmail app, which will allow any email supplier to be used rather than just Gmail.

The Gmail app might be the most popular choice but it is by no means loved. The lack of responsive rendering, coupled with the auto tabbing and the fact that the menu is top left but the compose email button is bottom right, means some people have to swap hands to compose an email on large phones.

Whilst Gmail has confirmed that responsive rendering is “high on the list” of priorities for its email products, we have only seen automatically enlarged text in Gmail for the iPhone. So it seemed that Android would be robbed of all responsive email potential -- until now.

After Microsoft acquired Acompli in December last year the company joined the ranks of buying email apps rather than making them itself. The new Outlook app was released only a few months later. We could easily speculate that work on this started before the acquisition.

On the Android, this app ticks all the boxes. There are only two tabs: “focused,” which looks for conversations and emails from people, and “other,” more for marketing notifications, etc. More important is the easy filter that shows only unread emails. This is very handy, seeing as many people use their inbox as a to-do list, and emails requiring actions are the unread ones.

The other big winner is that it will render responsive emails, so now users of Android phones are no longer forced to use two hands to pinch, zoom and scroll around a desktop email on a small screen.

Microsoft may well be the most progressive inbox provider of the moment. The app feels more focussed on business users and, as expected, has the usual built-in calendar and some clever integrations with online storage providers, too, to help with sharing files.

Apple’s native email app on mobile devices is very popular due to that fact it renders everything like a browser, which separates it from almost all other inboxes in the desktop browser, desktop app or mobile devices. So Outlook will have a harder time converting people that are already set-up. However, people are used to Outlook at work, and those who do try it may well stick with it.