Yahoo Mail does a Google! The app on iOS and Android devices has been upgraded to enhance user experience. Users can customise the inbox with different colours and personalise it with black/white backgrounds.
To meet the needs of new mobile users and deliver a user-friendly Yahoo Mail experience on every smartphone at all network speeds, Oath Inc. has announced two major initiatives. Firstly, the company has launched a completely modern Yahoo Mail mobile experience and, secondly, it has launched a dedicated app optimised for Android Go phones (entry-level Android devices).
The new UI is clean and introduces a Swipe feature, which gives users the ability to take actions on emails quickly and easily by swiping right to “mark as read” and left to “delete”. In case of sponsored mails, Swipe right enables an ad free experience. However, If you want to go ad free, you can choose one of two options – you can either try it for 7 days for free and then subscribe for it for Rs 65 per month thereafter or choose a 30 day free trial and then subscribe for Rs 650 a year. Swiping left dislikes ads and a pop-up appears asking you to choose the reason why you disliked that particular ad.
Further, users can customise the look and feel of the inbox with new colour themes that include light and dark backgrounds. There's a new sidebar menu that has folders for easy organisation. The auto-suggest feature will help compose emails faster and Yahoo Mail will also suggest frequently used email addresses when a user types the first few letters. The mail checking feature has been made a lot easier with infinite scrolling and users don’t have to hit the “next” button to see more emails.
Meanwhile, the Yahoo Mail Go app for Android Oreo (Go Edition) devices delivers the same features enjoyed by the current Android app, while keeping the RAM usage on devices below 50MB and install size below 10MB. The company claims that since the original Yahoo Mail app is extremely lightweight, it didn’t have to remove major features to reduce the app size for Go.
Oath Inc — a subsidiary of Verizon Communications that serves as the umbrella company of its digital content subdivisions, including AOL and Yahoo — also revealed the build of the app and the differences between the two variants.
According to the company, while the enhanced version is written in JavaScript and built using Node.js, the basic version of Yahoo mobile web is written in PHP and built using Apache. The enhanced version uses AJAX. The basic version uses form submit for all user actions. In the enhanced version, there are no reloads – all actions (e.g., deleting, marking as read, and marking as spam, emptying trash) are instant. The basic version reloads the page on every interaction. The enhanced version is a fully interactive app-like experience. The basic version has limited interactivity.
Interestingly, the news comes at a time when Google is in the process of shaking up the Gmail experience by introducing features like Swipe, auto-suggestions and a new design.
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Sourabh Kulesh
A journalist at heart; has knowledge of a wide gamut of topics related to enterprise and consumer tech. View Full Profile
