Fixes flood in for iOS and Android email — but they aren’t broken

There’s been a lot of action this year on new email clients for iOS and Android, with a good dozen startups trying to fix the standard Apple Mail and Google Email clients. There’s a problem: Mobile mail is not broken. Although some tools have an interesting abaility or two, overall they are less capable and harder to use than the tools they seek to replace.

A strong contingent out there believes email is bad and should be replaced with social-style messaging systems. They’re nuts. The mobile mail folks don’t quite share that view, but they believe that email clients should do more than email, which is also why so many are hard to use.

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I can think of good reasons to use a different email client in iOS or Android. One: Your company wants assured separation of work mail from personal mail, enforced by requiring a separate client such as the one installed by your MDM provider or even Microsoft’s OWA app for Office 365 users.

Another reason is that you are a die-hard Gmail user and want to use Google’s Gmail Web interface on your mobile device. It’s not a great reason, but it’s a real one.

The various mobile email clients I’ve tried — OWA, Gmail, Mail+, Mailbox, and Boxer — don’t support all the email account types that Apple Mail or Google Email do. That especially matters for business users. For example, OWA supports only Office 365, but not on-premises Exchange. The free Gmail supports only Gmail. Neither Mail+ nor the $9.99 Boxer support Office 365,  though they support on-premises Exchange (you need the $5.99 Mail+ for Outlook to get Exchange support), nor do they support POP accounts. The free Mailbox supports only Gmail and iCloud IMAP.

I’m also skeptical of the free email client apps. Developers need apps to make money, and free apps typically do so by analyzing your communications and personal data for sale to advertisers. I don’t want either my personal or business email used that way. That’s publicly the point behind Google’s Gmail. The other approach to free apps is to get a big customer base, then force a switch to a paid version.

Still, there are some features that you might wish Apple Mail or Google Email supported.

For example, OWA lets you ignore a thread, so all the replies don’t disturb you. You can also create a reminder from email text, similar to how Apple Mail lets you add contacts and calendar events from text in messages. Additionally, OWA lets you see your (Office 365 only) calendars and contacts, but switching among them is no different than switching among separate apps; there’s no advantage here other than the need to keep work stuff truly separated. The ability to set a password to open the app is a nice feature, though.

Google’s Gmail for iOS lets you add to your email attachments stored in Google Drive, getting around an Apple Mail limitation. (Android apps can access both local file storage and cloud storage by default.) But iOS 8 will remove that limitation, at least for documents stored in iCloud. Perhaps more useful is Gmail’s ability to tag messages so that you can find them later by those tags. Gmail also lets you ignore the barrage of replies in a message thread. The ability to set up an auto-reply, such as for when you are in vacation, is truly useful, but too bad Gmail is a Gmail-only app.

Like Gmail, Mail+ lets you attach to your messages attachments from cloud storage services — Box and Dropbox, to be precise. And like OWA, Mail+ lets you set a password to open it. Mail+ supports a wide enough set of email account types that you could consider it as a replacement for Apple Mail (it’s an iOS-only app). But its contacts feature is abysmal, and you forgo the integration with the highly compatible Apple Contacts. Plus, its user interface is overly complex.

The iOS-only Boxer provides attachment support for Box and Dropbox, like Mail+ does. It can also send emails and their attachments to Evernote, to feed data directly into the popular organizer service. But its best feature is the ability to create to-do lists from emails that you can then manage and prioritize. Where that falls down is lack of integration with standard business tools like Exchange. Boxer also makes it hard to navigate mail folders. Its vaunted “easy gestures” don’t cover much of your needs and aren’t easier to use than its regular controls. Also, its ability to “like” an email is dumb.

The free Mailbox app takes the route of simpler is better: You get a very simple list of emails and basic controls to mark them read or reply. It’s all about getting to a “zero inbox” of no unread messages. If you use email as both a place to monitor new messages and a place to archive conversations and the details of your projects — to me, email’s greatest strength — you won’t like Mailbox. I believe in practicing “zero inbox” by storing my acted-on messages into relevant folders, not by tossing them into a massive, undifferentiated archive as Mailbox does.

It’s great that developers are trying to make email better, even if it isn’t broken. Too bad that none has succeeded. At the end of the day, Apple Mail and Google Email do most everything you need and work with practically any email account you might have. The competitors have to start there, then find a way to stand out tall. None has yet.

This article, “Fixes flood in for iOS and Android email — but they aren’t broken,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.