Mailbox

» see mailboxapp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

mailbox launched on 7 february 2013 as an iphone-only email app from orchestra inc, the company gentry underwood and scott cannon had spent two years on. it did one thing: it turned your gmail inbox into a queue that you cleared with swipes. swipe right to archive. swipe left to snooze, and pick "later today" or "next week" so the message disappeared and came back when you wanted it. that was inbox-zero as a daily ritual.

the launch was the loudest indie-app moment of early 2013. the team had built a reservation queue you joined the day before launch, and by the morning of the seventh more than 380,000 people were waiting in line for an app that was free. the app store activation was metered: you opened the app, you saw your spot in the queue, you waited days to be let in. for the first month mailbox was the second-most-downloaded free app in the store and people talked about their queue position the way they had talked about gmail invites in 2004.

i was an android-and-windows person through this whole window, working as a computer engineer in ankara on stuff that did not need email theater. mailbox was an iphone-only product the entire year that mattered, and the cult around it was a san-francisco-design-twitter cult i could only watch from outside. the android build only landed in april 2014, by which point dropbox had already bought the company and the energy had moved elsewhere.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

underwood was an interaction designer from ideo, and the app showed it. the swipe gestures had haptic ramps and clear undo states. the snooze ui was a single screen of large buttons. there was a tiny green checkmark animation when your inbox hit zero, and that animation became the actual emotional product. people screenshotted it.

dropbox acquired orchestra inc in march 2013, about five weeks after the public launch. the reported price was around $100 million, mostly in stock. drew houston's pitch was that dropbox would expand from files into the broader life-of-your-stuff layer, and email was the next big bucket. the mailbox team kept its name and kept shipping. android arrived in april 2014. a mac beta arrived in august 2014.

~ the decline ~

mailbox could not get past gmail. the app worked on gmail and icloud at launch, briefly added yahoo, and never reliably supported microsoft exchange. exchange was where most of the world's actual business email lived in 2013-2015, and the corporate user base mailbox needed to graduate from cult app to mass app was on the wrong protocol. the team kept shipping ui polish for an audience that was already converted.

the snooze model also turned out to be habit-fragile. it worked beautifully if you were the kind of person who would spend ten minutes per morning triaging email by hand. for everyone else, snoozing a hundred emails in a row produced a "later" pile that crashed back into the inbox in waves. the green-checkmark hit was real but it was a hit a lot of users stopped chasing after a few months.

~ the postmortem ~

dropbox announced on 7 december 2015 that both mailbox and carousel, the photo app dropbox had launched in 2014, would be shut down. mailbox would die on 26 february 2016. carousel would die a month later. the official line was that dropbox had decided email and photos were not where it should be spending engineering effort, and that fixing email at the protocol layer was not something an app could do.

the closer reading was that dropbox was preparing for an ipo and consolidating around the file-sharing business. mailbox had not grown the way the acquisition price had assumed it would. the audience was small and already happy. the audience that was supposed to come next had not come. underwood left dropbox shortly after the shutdown.

~ the long tail ~

mailbox normalized swipe-to-archive across the whole inbox category. gmail's mobile app added swipe gestures that mirrored mailbox's almost exactly, and apple mail eventually shipped its own version. the snooze concept got absorbed into google inbox in 2014 and survives in current gmail's snooze button. the green-checkmark moment, fewer products dared to try.

the cult around mailbox is still a reference point for what indie-app design could do at peak. for a year it was the example product everyone in the prosumer-app world was trying to learn from. the lesson most of them took was the wrong one: get acquired fast. the lesson the rest of us took watching from outside was that an app that solved gmail was an app that lived inside gmail's mood, and gmail eventually took back the mood.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »