Do youWhat position would you give Gmail in the ranking of Google’s most successful products and services? Obviously the first position on the list belongs to the search engine himself, who rose like foam in the first years since its launch and, so far, has managed to stay at the top, far from the rest of its competitors. And in my opinion the second position is disputed by Android and Gmail, the email service of the search engine.
There are those who no longer remember it, and even those who did not get to experience it, but in its early days Gmail was a revolutionary service, with an unthinkable capacity in those days (one gigabyte per account) and which, yes, could not access everything the world. To get an account it was necessary to receive an invitation, and these were a rare and highly valued good at that time. There were even forums and lists (not Google, of course) in which many people asked for invitations, and from time to time some generous holder of some of them distributed them among the applicants.
This results in some of us still remember the moment in which we received said invitation, who was the person who opened the doors of Gmail for us, and who we invited to the service with the first ones we received. Those were times when giving away email accounts with a gigabyte of capacity seemed something exclusive and, therefore, it would remain exclusive for a long, long time.
This story happened in 2004. 18 years have passed, the storage capacity of Google accounts (to which Gmail accounts are associated) is 15 gigabytes and anyone who wishes can sign up for the service. The most difficult thing is, in many cases, finding a username that we like and that is not already in use. If they had told us then, we would not have come out of our amazement.
Thus, and as it happened with the search engine, Gmail quickly became the most used service, once it was no longer necessary to receive an invitation to access, with a huge market share in all segments, but peaking among the youngest, thus auguring an excellent future for the service.
And in these days a most striking milestone has been reached, and that is that the Gmail app for Android has already reached 10,000 million downloads, as we can see in its file on Google Play.
One more milestone that adds to the long history of success not only of Gmail, but of many of Google’s proposals. Among the Gmail numbers, although Google does not usually lavish when it comes to publishing them, the service would already have more than 1,800 million users, which would give it 18% of the email client market share in May 2021.
