Well the great part about us working on the InboxSDK is that we need it ourselves for Streak. We were already doing a lot of the work and we wanted to more cleanly separate our business logic from our Gmail wrangling. As we add support to the SDK for Google's Inbox client, Streak and other apps built on the SDK will run inside of Google's Inbox for free and automatically.
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.
Great job and initiative! Gmelius Founder here. A few questions:
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.
i) Our long term plan is to do so, but not in the immediate term.
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)
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'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.
Very cool wrappers, I've used Streak off and on for a while and definitely appreciate how well it integrates with gmail.
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)?
We have systems in place to make sure we catch any changes to the DOM. We usually see these changes before 99% of gmail users and can make any necessary changes within minutes usually.
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).
Happy to answer any questions about the SDK.