What are your Gmail for Android pet peeves?

Gmail is one of my most used Android apps across personal and work contexts, but it’s far from what I consider to be a great experience.

9to5Google has a rebooted newsletter that highlights the biggest Google stories with added commentary and other tidbits. Sign up here!

My biggest pet peeve with Gmail for Android is how Google hasn’t really done anything novel with the UI in years. The core inbox and message layout has essentially remained the same across Material Design, Google Material Theme, and Material You. 

The integration of Google Chat and Meet had no real impact on the email experience unless your company (or friend group) actually uses those two services. In those scenarios, Gmail became an “everything” app for communication.

2016-17

It seemed at one point that Google was moving away from navigation drawers to bottom bars. I do wonder if that was ever feasible for Gmail, with the nav drawer proving the best solution for providing quick access to folders and labels wherever you are in the app. Anyways, the time for a bottom bar redesign would have been before that navigation element was taken up by Workspace. (Unless Google wants to give Gmail a floating/double bar like Chat, which continues to look overly busy.)

There’s something to be said about a UI that stays consistent, especially for something as vital as email. Especially with the sheer size of its user base, Gmail’s consistency is important. However, it should not come at the expense of trying new things that might help simplify or organize this form of communication.

2019

That said, this is starting to change. Google has introduced new features in the past year that have improved how I use Gmail every day. My favorite example is the Quick Reply redesign that lets you easily refer to the previous email as you’re typing a response. Before that, the reply interface remained the same for years. Another is how Summary Cards are getting richer and more glanceable to save you from having to read an entire email to find or open what’s important.

2024

AI will certainly make possible new things in the realm of auto-organization, summarization, and prioritization, but I think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit before that. I’d define this category of changes as quality-of-life and usability improvements. 

Again, Gmail’s message view has not fundamentally changed in a decade or so. You get the same three actions in the top-right corner with everything else housed in a pretty long overflow menu. The big question here is whether this is a good UI on today’s tall phones. Controls are not particularly reachable or ideal for one-handed usage. 

Another place that particular UI stagnation is actively and negatively impacting Gmail is on tablets and foldables. You just get those three buttons despite the ample horizontal screen real estate. At the very least, Gmail should place the actions for “Move to” and “Change labels” in the toolbar. Meanwhile, Google is adding a Gemini button and it looks quite busy. 

Elsewhere, it’d be nice if Gmail’s Android notifications weren’t limited to just Reply and Archive or Delete actions. All three just appear by default, while I’d personally like “Mark as read.” 

Another basic thing would be making sure there’s full feature parity between the mobile app and the website, no matter how small the capability. For example, you cannot delete individual messages in a thread on the phone app. Your only option is to trash the entire conversation. I’m sure this is more of an edge case request, but it’s silly that the mobile app cannot do everything the website can. It’s actually wild that I can only do something by going to my laptop in this day-and-age. 

There is a case for Gmail’s design to be thoroughly rethought and modernized for today’s mobile device. When/if this happens, what do you want Google to address?