Surely if you're on Hacker News you have some idea of how software development works, and that Google doesn't have a single team working on all their Android apps. Releasing something like this is unlikely to have diverted people away from GMail.

Instaedit: Sorry, that had a really harsh tone to it. I was just surprised to see that sort of post here, as opposed to Facebook where I can almost get that people believe there's a few people doing absolutely everything, and any thread is a valid dumping ground for the grievances.

Google's email app on iOS currently suffers the worst of two worlds:

i) no rich text editing

ii) it keeps the format of pasted text

This means you can't bold headings, and you can't unbold a sentence that you paste in.

The work-around -- compose messages in a different app to cut and paste in -- is sub optimal.