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Comment by squiggy22 | Hacker News Reader

What prevents Google closing the door on this?

Well, nothing really. But thats true for almost anything.

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.

A well rounded answer, but I'll pass for now. If Google really believed in your ethos of making the software more valuable via third parties, their platform wouldn't require dom hacks that could break without notice. i.e. they'd open up their own APIs to make building these sorts of apps themselves.

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('()')')

Sure Google could break this (maliciously or otherwise), but would you rather have to keep up with their changes on your own, or build something that works on InboxSDK, and let them play cat-and-mouse with the Inbox DOM? Worst case in the latter scenario is that a feature is down for as long as it takes for a fix to be released.

I'd rather target open standards, like client-side SMTP/IMAP.

Thanks for the safari bug. fixing...

I'm sure you guys have already figured this out by now, but you just need to add a polyfill for `endsWith` since Safari doesn't implement the ECMAScript 6 spec.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

I think they(infosdk) are offering an easy way to create browser extensions to interact with Gmail.

Google will need to do something really intrusive to break their SDK

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