Gmail’s less than perfect iPad app

Apple’s stock iPad mail app is perfectly adequate and does a good job handling Gmail. Despite this, Google created its own Gmail iPad app.

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

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

Often the text is tiny – in some cases in 4 or 5 point size – making it unreadable. You can, of course, zoom the message pane, but it’s clumsy when line lengths don’t readjust.

There are lessons from this:

• Why bother with a separate Gmail app when it does the job less well than the standard iPad mail app?
• For that matter, you can read Gmail in the browser.
• The problem underlines why you should stick with plain text in mail messages. Save the fancy stuff for web sites.