Gmail is one of the main props on which the Google empire rests. Present in our lives for almost 19 years, it is the most used email service in the world since 2012, and there are more than enough reasons for this, with the great capacity of the free accounts, the efficiency of the service and its apps and its linkage with the rest of the search engine company’s services. It is, and it was already intuited from its early days, a success story.
Part of it is due, of course, to the constant evolution of the service and everything associated with it. It is true that sometimes there are false steps, with Inbox by Gmail, an app for Android and iOS that came to light in 2014 and was discontinued in 2019, after five years coexisting with the main app of the service, in an experiment that never it became quite clear. However, there are many more correct decisions than errors in its history.
For his part, folding phones, although still very minor, aim to continue gaining presence in the coming years, and every time we see how more manufacturers are encouraged to explore this growing and interesting market. Up to now we can affirm that Samsung has been the leading voice, but everything points to the fact that in the medium term it will have to share an increasingly larger piece of the pie with many other manufacturers.
Thus, and as we can read in the Google Workspace blog, those of the search engine have decided to respond to this market trend and, consequently, have redesigned the interface of the Gmail app for folding smartphones of the Fold type. With this new design, the view is now split into two panes, offering a dual-screen experience that’s much more convenient than simply fitting all of your app’s content onto a wider screen.
As you can see in the image, when you open the Gmail client in a foldable, the view is divided into a panel that occupies the left part of the screen, in which we can see the inbox or the folder that we have selected, while the panel on the right shows us the content of the message that we have selected on the left . I don’t know what it will look like to you, but personally it seems to me a much more efficient use of the double screen of smartphones with this form factor.
In addition, it is interesting that Google is taking this step with its mail client, as it reminds us of the thousands of rumors that have circulated in recent years about the company’s plans to launch a Google Pixel Fold. That they have started to adapt their apps to this format precisely now, and not when the first smartphones of this type arrived, It could be a sign that the foldable Pixel is closer than we thought.
