I finally got so fed up with a bug in the iPhone's mail app that I downloaded Microsoft's instead
I like my iPhone. I've never considered trading it for another phone. The app selection is great. I've grown comfortable with the way it works. Switching sounds hard.
But Apple's email app has had this really annoying bug that finally drove me to my breaking point this morning.
Business Insider uses Google's Gmail for our work email, through the Google for Work program. For some reason, when some people fill out their titles in Gmail, the iPhone Mail app pulls in those titles as their names.
So, for example, one reporter in our office always shows up in my inbox as "Tech SF":
Another person out here shows up as "West Coast":
I also get mails from "UK" (somebody in our London office), "Editorial: Politics" (the editor of our Politics vertical), and so on.
I've tried resetting their names in my iPhone's Contacts app a bunch of times, but it has zero effect. My guess is that the Mail app keeps going back to the original Gmail Contacts data store and pulling information from the wrong field.
This is annoying, but hasn't been enough to get me to switch.
Until today.
I got an email last night from "West Coast." I read it quickly and thought it was from "Tech SF." So when the actual "Tech SF" showed up in the office this morning, I made a comment that totally confused her. I also asked the person who's actually "West Coast" a question that I should already have known the answer to.
Relatively minor. Nobody got horribly offended. But it made me think - what if one of the emails had contained something more sensitive, like the kind of personal or work-related information you might share with your manager but nobody else?
Enough's enough. I just downloaded and installed Outlook for iOS, which a couple of my colleagues have raved about - including the one referred to here as "West Coast." I don't know how it's going to compare with iOS Mail overall, but I have confirmed that it at least lists people's names correctly.
Between this and my subpar experience with the revamped Apple Music app - not the service, which I like, but the app itself - I'm starting to wonder if my next phone's going to be an iPhone after all.