Founder of Streak (YC S11) here - we built the InboxSDK using all of the work we've put into making Streak work great inside of Gmail.
Happy to answer any questions about the SDK.
Happy to answer any questions about the SDK.
InboxSDK was obviously a ton of work. What is your business model for it?
As for business model, we aren't really thinking about that too much, we just knew how much pain ppl went through making gmail apps and just knew that the SDK needed to exist. We don't plan on charging for it.
We've talked a lot about doing an appstore inside gmail. The idea being that apps could opt in to be in the appstore. If you opt-in then your app automatically adds the appstore to your users gmail experience. That would help drive traffic to apps. Once a user installs any one of the apps, they have access to all the other apps in the appstore.
i) Are you planning to make the whole implementation Open Source?
ii) Say I wish to adopt and use your SDK in my current Gmail/Inbox extensions (>100K daily users), may I expect the implementation of a fixed upper limit on the number of transmissions in the coming months (which could endanger the reliability of my service for my users)?
iii) While the SDK currently only focuses on the UI, are you planning to add more "complex" interactions, such as Gmail filters/Gmail preferences ? If yes, feel free to get in touch. I will be happy to help.
Congrats, again.
ii) The SDK loads a static JS file so we aren't really worried about having a lot of users requesting that. We're hosting the SDK on appengine so I wouldn't expect any caps on users or anything like that. Dropbox has a ~500K weekly actives (as you can see from the chrome webstore: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dropbox-for-gmail-...) using it and I expect that to grow.
iii) can you describe the use case a bit more? Specifically are you looking to get the set of filters or add new ones or both? On the preferences side, are you looking to add your own? We have this functionality in Streak but haven't yet ported it over to the SDK (but will soon)
Google will need to do something really intrusive to break their SDK
We think you can trust the platform because we're fundamentally making Gmail better and more valuable to Google's users. There are a handful of successful businesses (like Streak and others) already built on top of gmail and have been for years. These venture backed companies already trust their business to be on top of Gmail. We're just making the process of building these apps waaaay easier.
We take security and performance really really seriously. Because our SDK helps you build Chrome extensions for Gmail, Google can (and has) shut down shady apps from the Chrome Webstore, so they don't have to shutdown the entire platform to get rid of a bad actors.
I absolutely commend you for what you are doing, I just wouldn't be willing as a developer to dip my toes in that particular water to spend the time developing something they could rip apart and break.
As a side note, the documentation page is broken on Mac Safari 8 on OSX Javascript error:
TypeError: undefined is not a function (evaluating 'reference.endsWith('()')')
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
Do you have any notion of how fragile things are when dom-hacking? Do you have to constantly keep up with google's updates or are things fairly stable? i.e. how often will I need to update and/or patch an extension to maintain support (in your experience so far)?
In the last 6 months we've seen 0 breaking changes, 1 in the 6 months before that (it was fixed before the change even reached users), and 2 in the prior 12 months (where our fix reached product in sub 10 minutes).
Wow. Nicely done!