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iOS 18.2 Mail Sorting Features Strangely Absent on iPad and Mac
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I don’t get why they even forked iPadOS in the first place. At the time they said it was to develop iPad features independent of iPhone. But in the five years since then, iPadOS has mostly lagged in features compared to iOS. And they’ve barely developed iPad-specific features. There’s multitasking but not much else to justify having to maintain separate code bases. It’s probably more work than it’s worth.
I have this on my iPhone 15 Plus. (And I live in a country where AI is not available.) It looks like the email sorting has nothing to do with AI.
This is one of my biggest complaints about the last 3 or 4 major upgrades to all the Apple operating systems. AI is just the latest, and arguably the largest, mess Apple has ever dumped on us. Not only is it fragmented between devices, but many of the features are "meh" at best (I'm looking at you, Image Playground).
Mail is one of the most under-developed apps Apple has ever released, and subsequently barely touched. And what they have done has actually hurt usability (such as removing the ability to use most all extensions/plug-ins). Leaving it out of the macOS upgrade is just infuriating to me.
Accord
From the article:
"The new feature automatically sorts emails into four distinct categories: Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions, with the aim of helping iPhone users better organize their inboxes. Devices that support Apple Intelligence also surface priority messages as part of the new system. "
From the last sentence it becomes very clear.
So, either you know more than the author, or you don't.
Which is it?
According to the article, this feature is not an Apple Intelligence feature.
From the article:
"The new feature automatically sorts emails into four distinct categories: Primary, Transactions, Updates, and Promotions, with the aim of helping iPhone users better organize their inboxes. Devices that support Apple Intelligence also surface priority messages as part of the new system. "
From the last sentence it becomes very clear.
So, either you know more than the author, or you don't.
Which is it?
I have a 13 mini, which doesn't have AI, but yet my iPhone mail got the categories.
On the other hand, my iPad Pro M4, which does have AI, didn't get the categories.
My 11 had the categories (for all of a few seconds before I turned it off), so it's not using AI.
While I know a few popular 3rd Party mail apps have categories, it's not a feature I need / want / trust. Beyond not enabling 'Apple Intelligence' (something of an oxymoron) on my devices, setting my iPhone's Mail to 'List' was the first app specific setting I changed.
Apple software team needs Scott Forstall… but is not only Apple.
As software engineer I can see a big decline on productivity and quality in all teams… I can blame some narratives and pratices by new engineers.
It’s time to back to the primitive!
As software engineer I can see a big decline on productivity and quality in all teams… I can blame some narratives and pratices by new engineers.
It’s time to back to the primitive!
This feature was smartly implemented in iOS - accurate and well designed - and I was looking forward to seeing it in iPadOS as well, but alas... What a big disappointment. I now also have two completely different unread mail counts across my devices, which is frustrating. I’m at a loss as to why this wasn’t uniformly implemented for all OSs.