iOS comes with a mail client. It connects to my exchange, gmail and Zoho accounts.
You don’t install gmail, you connect a mail client to it or visit it in a web browser.
You don’t install gmail, you connect a mail client to it or visit it in a web browser.
It’s great if you never search for email I guess.
...from 5 accounts with at least a decade of history each, incl. my office e-mail.
But that means any spotlight bug is a mail search bug, and a settings search bug, and a “just launch this app” search bug, etc etc etc.
It also means that any bugs caused by one of these applications end up affecting them all. So if Contacts causes an indexer crash, none of your searches anywhere work any more. It’s a super fragile architecture. They did some work to split some of the plugins into separate processes but somehow it always ends up being insufficient.
At least on macOS there are some commands to blow away your spotlight index when it goes bad. On iOS you’re basically screwed unless you wipe and restore the OS.
These types of things should stand as big massive red flashing warnings with all these locked down systems - as you point out, in certain situations on iOS you’re just stuffed.
If I took over Apple's software engineering, I would tell every engineer "None of you are working on features until a stock OS install has zero error/warning logs. No exceptions. Contribute to fixes or use your vacation time, but nobody touches anything until we get it all fixed. Then once that's done, nobody's allowed to work on features while there are open bugs in their backlog. No exceptions."
This is why Gmail is nicer in many areas.
TIL. We really do live in separate bubbles.