I’m joining the fray on the Mailbox shutdown and have some thoughts on tablets because of the Pixel C launch.

Mailbox shutting down

Many words have already been written about Dropbox’s announcement that they’re shutting down Mailbox, but I’m giving some thoughts on it anyway. I remember signing up for an account of this email application and watching the countdown until I finally got my anticipated invite. At the time, it was a glimpse of the future. An email app that among other things would allow you to snooze your email, and allow you custom views for things you wanted to watch later.

As many others I was impressed at the way this all worked, and hoped to see similar features would show up in other apps as well. As usual, this soon happened with other email apps implementing similar features. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t intend to give Mailbox credit for all of these features, as there have been services that do similar things before Mailbox came around. The big difference though is that Mailbox was free, and therefore made a bigger splash among people who are always more eager to try out something that doesn’t cost money.

Then shortly after their launch, Mailbox was purchased by Dropbox. This of course came with the usual fears of how this would impact the application¹. At first Dropbox made all the right sounds though, and after a while a desktop app appeared². Over time however, the apps started to languish and didn’t receive a lot of attention anymore. Obviously Dropbox was starting to focus on other things, and that came at the cost of Mailbox, until last week when they announced the shutdown.

For me personally this wasn’t a big problem as I’d already moved on to other apps (Dispatch and Spark on iOS, and Airmail on the Mac). But why does this matter? Why are people upset about this? After all, apps die all the time, either because they were acquired or because they weren’t and couldn’t survive without money. In a way expecting free apps to always exist and be supported seems a bit of false entitlement³. That feeling of entitlement is human nature however, so that can be expected. People spend a lot of time using something they like, something they know, and suddenly they will have to change. Change is generally not appreciated.

There is more here though. When Sparrow was killed of, people only lost access to future updates for the app, and there were plenty who continued using it for a long time afterwards. This however is impossible with Mailbox. As I said at the start, Mailbox wasn’t just a simple IMAP or Gmail client. It did a lot more, and that meant that all the email had to pass through their servers before it reached your phone.

And that in my opinion is what actually really matters about this shutdown. No longer does a developer who stops working on an app mean that you don’t get anymore updates, it is ever more likely that you won’t be able to use it anymore at all⁴. Is this likely to be a problem in the long run? Maybe. It’s going to be a trade off, on the one hand there will always be something new coming up and these features are so useful but on the other that means you’re more likely to need to switch at some point.

Pixel C reviews and the point of tablets

Google released the Pixel C, their latest high end tablet. Pretty much every review I’ve seen mentioned how great the hardware is, and how terrible the app situation is. I find this surprising, not the opinions themselves but the app situation for Android tablets. I always knew it wasn’t great, but not having paid attention to it for several years I though it would have improved by now. After all, if even Google’s own apps are terrible on Android tablets, and don’t seem to be improving, why are they bothering to make the hardware?

Obviously as I don’t make decisions at Google I can’t explain their reasoning. Instead, let’s focus on something I do know a bit more about: how Android isn’t alone in having an app issue with their tablets. With the coming of the iPad Pro an old refrain regarding apps on the iPad reared its head again. The issue here is different though, as there are many apps optimized for the iPad, including a lot of good ones. Unfortunately, there aren’t as many professional grade apps because the App Store economics don’t make sense for the developers. Of course, this actually helps bigger companies like Adobe and Microsoft as they can use subscription models to get recurring revenue from their otherwise free apps⁵.

The app situation on iOS has been debated many times, and I have no intention of wading into that right now aside from pointing it out. What I do want to point out is that this is something many reviewers of the Pixel C seemed to ignore, just like they managed to point out that it “still” doesn’t support things like having multiple apps on screen. A feature that’s been in iOS for almost 3 whole months!⁶

So, as someone who mostly uses Apple devices, why would I care about this tablet receiving so many negative reviews? It’s not so much that I care about a single tablet, but more how this will continue marking tablets as mere toys or entertainment tools. I’m no Federico Viticci who can do nearly 100% of his work on the iPad, but for many things it is the first device I grab. Writing articles for this site is mostly done on my iPad⁷, as is doing courses, even server management, and many other things. The main thing I haven’t done yet on this is writing code. There are editors available, but they don’t seem to do what I want. This also means that when I go on holiday (I’m currently having a great time in New Zealand) I can simply put my iPad in my bag and not worry about the things that make laptops worse than tablets.

For the Pixel C this does mean that there need to be more apps before it can begin to act as a productivity device though, and it seems clear that Google will have to show how this is done. As Google’s iPad apps are pretty good (though often still waiting for iOS 9 features) they are obviously capable of it, and their recent AMA on Reddit seems to imply that there is focus on this aspect of it. Personally I hope this will indeed be the case so tablets will show their true power sooner rather than later.