Gmail’s less than perfect iPad app

Apple’s stock iPad mail app is perfectly adequate. It's not fancy, but it achieves what it sets out to do. It works well with an Apple email address and you can use it with other services. It does a good job handling Gmail accounts. 

Even so, Google felt the need to create its own Gmail iPad app. 

This makes sense to people who are fully committed to Google’s mail service and the company's other tools.

OK up to a point and then it is not

Google's iPad app works fine for dealing with text mail messages, but fails badly when people send messages laid out using tools like HTML or, worse, when text is embedded in images. The mail body appears to the right of the message list – as shown in the picture above.

Often the app displays text in a tiny size – in some cases as small as 4 or 5 point size – making it unreadable. You can, of course, zoom the message pane with the iPad expand gesture, but it’s clumsy to view when line lengths don’t readjust.

My first thought about this is:

Why bother with a separate Gmail app when it does the job less well than the standard iPad mail app?

Google's reasons are not our reasons

Clearly it exists for Google's reasons, not to provide customers with a better experience. Admittedly they don't pay for Gmail, but even so, it's a worse experience. 

This is more curious when you consider you can easily read Gmail on the iPad by using the Safari browser. It works better than the app. 

A second thought is the problem with Google's Gmail app underlines why, where possible, you should stick with plain text in mail messages. It works every time. Save the fancy stuff for web sites.