OPINION: The long-awaited Apple Mail revamp in iOS 18.2 will match Gmail’s most redeeming feature with smart categorisation. If it works well, it’s bye-bye Gmail app.
I’m not the biggest fan of the Gmail app for iPhone, but it does a couple of important things Apple’s native mail app doesn’t – like weed out out the emails beyond the Primary inbox.
I just took a look at my Mail app on iPhone and sat within my inbox are promotional emails, those from social media companies, and other random updates that are duly sent to separate inboxes in the Gmail app.
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Better still, Gmail doesn’t notify me of anything that arrives outside of the Primary inbox. Apple Mail does. When you’re trying to keep your day focused, those promotional emails not only add a ton of clutter and make important things harder to find, but breaks your conversation. Another uneccessary ping to attract your gaze.
However, there are times when it really would be beneficial to use the Apple Mail app. It’s more entwined with other Apple apps on your phone, for starters. The Files app, the Photos app, Calendar, Notes, Reminders, et al.
Sometimes it can be a real nuisance using Gmail in terms of sharing content from other areas of your phone or from iCloud. Besides, the creep of Google’s machine learning integration and scanning of your content makes me uncomfortable.
So news that the relaunched Apple Mail app for iOS 18 is now being previewed in the first developer beta for iOS 18.2 is music to my ears.
The new app features on-device processing to sort incoming emails into Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. Provided it works well, without filtering emails you need to see into the wrong categories and vice versa, it see the Apple Mail app catch up to the Gmail app.
We’ll have to see how this plays out in practice, of course, but hopefully it means you can specify that you only wish to receive notifications for Primary inbox emails. This would go a long way towards bringing me back to the native Mail app for iPhone, Mac and iPad.
Apple explains: “Categorization in Mail organizes messages to help users stay on top of their inbox. The Primary category lets users focus on the messages that matter most or contain time-sensitive information. Transactions, Updates, and Promotions are grouped by sender in a new digest view that pulls together all relevant emails from a business, allowing users to quickly scan for what’s important in the moment.”
The new app, announced way back in June at WWDC 2024, wasn’t included within the main iOS 18 release in September. That’s now becoming par for the course with these updates, but that’s another piece altogether…
