Google deploys giant update for iOS Gmail app with new design, improved speed

Google has unveiled a completely redesigned Gmail for iOS app, adding support for Gmail's "undo send" feature, and vast improvements to search.

The app, in addition to implementing the new Google design elements that it introduced about two years ago has a five-second "undo send" implementation, similar to the up-to 30 second delay allowable through web mail.

Search is significantly faster as well. In initial AppleInsider tests of the application, a multi-term search in a 55,000 email archive returned results nearly instantly on a fast wi-fi connection, rather than taking up to 11 seconds to complete the search on an older version of the Gmail app.

Other aspects of the mail app have been improved, leading to faster app utility overall, as well as faster scrolling, and much faster notification from Gmail than before. In the previous versions, testing revealed a user notification being sent to the user about 18 seconds after mail receipt, with the new version sending the new mail notification also nearly instantaneously.

Google also notes that spelling suggestions have been added, and users can now swipe on an email to archive or delete an email.

The Gmail application is free, requires iOS 8 or newer, and is a 197 MB download.

17 Comments

GLBorchert 1 comment · 8 Years

About 8 years ago

What a piece of crap this update is for me. I get 500 or more spam messages, or unwanted messages, in my inbox each day. My methodology has been to select all but a handful of desirable email messages on my iPhone and then to delete all of them. With this new update I now have to pen each crappy email to delete. Thanks Google fopr making my workday much worse.

gatorguy 24603 comments · 13 Years

You don't have a folder where promotional mail goes? I don't ever see any spam or ads unless I open the "Promotions" folder. But with that out of the way Outlook might be a better mail app for you on iOS anyway.

coolfactor 2332 comments · 20 Years

GLBorchert said:

What a piece of crap this update is for me. I get 500 or more spam messages, or unwanted messages, in my inbox each day. My methodology has been to select all but a handful of desirable email messages on my iPhone and then to delete all of them. With this new update I now have to pen each crappy email to delete. Thanks Google fopr making my workday much worse.

If you've been sending unfiltered spam to your Trash instead of the Spam/Junk folder, then your account is not getting the training that it needs to recognize future spam. You need to train it by marking messages as spam that are. And likewise for false-positives — if a good message goes to the Spam, move it to the Inbox. Both of those actions train your account.

As for seeing all messages in the Inbox, I've seen other reports of people seeing that, too. It seems that it's not showing you just "Inbox"-labeled messages, but messages from the "All Mail" folder? Might just need a tweak of your settings.

dysamoria 3430 comments · 12 Years

I've almost never seen spam outside the spam folder.

As for the app, I think it's a piece of crap that doesn't belong on iOS. I hope this new version is more usable.

WildKyoti 1 comment · 8 Years

Where is the "mark as unread" feature? I used that ALL the time to quickly read an email when I'm on the go, then mark it as unread so I don't forget to respond to it later on. This is very important to me