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Comment by rubyn00bie | Hacker News Reader

Yeah... this is gonna be a big "no" from me, dawg.

There's probably a segment of small mid-sized businesses to prey upon making apps with this; but outside of that this has got to be the most terrifying platform to ever build upon.

1. It's based on a specific email provider.

2. That provider is google.

3. Google has zero incentive to give a shit about about anyone or anything using its platform.

4. Average SDK releases per week: 12 (screw the fact GMail hasn't been responsible for breaking changes)

Focusing on a tool that does this shit, on any platform, or one that integrates into any email provider... that'd be neat. This I am afraid of...

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People use Gmail. They don't care about portability as long as it just works.

Considering how long it takes to become interactive on anything that's not Chrome, I'd hardly call it a working product.

Use the right tool for the right job.

Chrome is not the right tool because it was specifically built for Gmail. It's the right tool because Google hates competition.

Not trying to be a huge ass here, but that's what I meant with this:

> probably a segment of small mid-sized businesses to prey upon making apps with this

There's a bunch of poorly run, but funded start ups, and mid sized businesses, that are literally powered by excuses. Very likely anything built with this is powering the train of excuses, not solutions. I'd go so far as to point out that Streak made it... Meaning they're obviously trying to branch out because their market isn't shit; which means, your potential market, is a segment of shit... (well as far as this site's scaling model is concerned).

If you want a lifestyle business (which I think is perfectly freakin' awesome)... sure, maybe (read: not) this is for you. But even then... it's a lot of risk for something you could probably do with one or two people. Just look at the fucking SDK changes; yeah GMail doesn't necessarily break shit, but... they (streak) do. How is that any better than your own set of brittle scripts which you have to maintain multiple times a week?

I think this is a gimmick at best, and at worst it'll completely waste someone's time and money.

Founder of Streak here and, as you pointed out, we authored the InboxSDK.

Just to clarify a few things, our market is actually great, the CRM industry is huge and we do very well in it - we're profitable!

As for why we made the SDK, we're not "branching" out - we made this for ourselves because we needed it. We built a bunch of tech to wrangle Gmail and the way we engineered it is we separated it from our main business logic. We didn't want others to have to go through what we did (reverse engineering a lot of gmail) so we made it available for anyone to use. We don't charge for it and we maintain it for free.

Several large companies (Dropbox, HubSpot, etc) depend on this SDK to power their Gmail integrations so it's not just small and medium sized companies.

Your comment was a bit harsh, but I guess that means we need to address this stuff better on our website.

My startup built a chrome extension for Gmail before inboxsdk and it broke every time there was a google change.

So glad you guys brought your solution to the world as freeware so scrappy startups like mine could avoid having to chase all those updates.

"Meaning they're obviously trying to branch out because their market isn't shit; which means, your potential market, is a segment of shit... (well as far as this site's scaling model is concerned)."

I've read this sentence a couple times and have no clue what you're trying to say. By this logic anyone who uses AWS is working in a "shit" market, which is not the case.

"it's a lot of risk for something you could probably do with one or two people"

Have you ever tried to do this? It is harder than you might think. In addition, one or two people will cost ~300k/year which is a lot.

Your comment is ridiculously dismissive and poorly argued.

2 billion people use gmail.

And ~65% of the web users use Chrome. One probably builds for the majority first. Is it ideal? No. But it's 80-20 principle-aligned.

I mean Superhuman has built a kickass company on top of just gmail...

let's see if it lasts. their product is great, i tried it out, but the value it brought me was not worth the money i spent + my email being on their servers

> It's based on a specific email provider.

Companies who want to be integrated everywhere often have to write a lot of product-specific integrations.

Outlook, Office365 etc... And Gmail because Gmail is big.

> screw the fact GMail hasn't been responsible for breaking changes

As someone contributing to Gmail.js, allow me to absolutely counter this claim.

The change to “new” Gmail took months of effort to properly reverse-engineer, and there’s been small changes in behaviour since launch which breaks stuff some of the time.

While there are people that would stay away from G, there are even more that choose G because "nobody ever got fired for chosing G". It is much easier to sell to those ppl if your offering runs on G.

> There's probably a segment of small mid-sized businesses to prey upon making apps with this

You realize it's mostly for enterprise companies building internal tools, right?

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