Mail in iOS 13
No, the only place you’ll find the multicolored flag options is, somewhat nonsensically, under the Reply button from a message itself.
iOS needs a menu bar or something.
Tap the Flag button there and you’ll get a sub-menu that lets you choose one of seven colors, as well as an option to remove a flag.
Whatever color you’ve picked there most recently will be treated as the default on that device until you pick another color. So, if you go to flag a message using one of those other methods after choosing a color, you’ll see the Flag button color changed to reflect that. But jump from your iPhone to an iPad and you may have a totally different color.
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But my other favorite improvement to Mail in iOS 13 is an iPad-only capability that came along with the multitasking features: message composition windows can be dragged into Split View mode, so you can write an email while referring to another email.
I updated to the new iOS yesterday and have since accidentally deleted at least 6 emails instead of replying to those emails and that does not seem like a great feature.
Update (2019-09-27): Craig Grannell:
The previous grab shows Mail in iOS 12 (left) and iOS 13 (right). On the left, you have immediate access to options that let you flag, file, archive/delete, reply, and start a new message. It’s not overly complicated, and it looks fine. Also: all these actions are fundamental to rapidly dealing with email. Now, you only get archive/delete and reply.
Update (2019-09-30): Kyle Howells:
iOS 13 Mail app moves the reply/move controls into a fake toolbar in the email content, which means if you have a slow network and it takes a while to load you also can’t access any of those controls until it’s loaded.
Update (2019-10-03): Kyle Howells:
The mail app on iOS 13 does feel almost like a web app.
The design direction needs to be rapidly reversed for that app.
Filing an email message used to mean tapping the folder button in the bottom toolbar. Now it means tapping the curvy arrow, then scrolling up to expose the Move Message button, and then tapping it.
Why would Apple remove quick access to so many useful features in favor of this “archive plus junk drawer” setup? Luckily for me, the vast majority of the email I receive is simply archived. But for anyone that frequently perform other actions, this change is terrible.
Despite the way it is worded in settings the swipe actions work in the message view too.
For me it means tapping the trash by mistake because it’s right next to the arrow with blank space everywhere else, then shaking to undo like an idiot, then finally hitting the arrow
Update (2019-10-11): Riccardo Mori:
You wonder why people are criticising Mail’s UI in iOS 13? Look at this: all the controls and UI elements have been remained consistent from iOS 6 to iOS 12.
Update (2019-10-21): Michael Kosta (Marcin Krzyzanowski):
Why didn’t @apple move the delete button over 1 inch? Big mistake.
Update (2019-10-25): Craig Hockenberry:
Muscle memory is a bitch.
I would also love to understand the design decisions that went into the latest version of Mail.
So much hidden functionality, but why?
Update (2019-11-27): John Gruber:
And it just seems odd to me that they moved all these features there in the first place. The iPhone really only has room for five toolbar buttons. Flag, Move, Trash, Reply, and New Message seemed like good ones. What’s the point of having only two buttons and all that unused whitespace on the left side? In addition to the fact that it’s not intuitive to look for Flag and Move commands behind a button that clearly looks like “Reply”, it’s also a bit frustrating to me that there’s no longer a way to just create a new message from this screen — you have to go back one level in the navigation controller to the list of messages to create a new (non-reply) message.
At the very least, if the toolbar is only going to have these two buttons, why not place the Trash button on the far left, and put the whitespace between the two buttons? That would eliminate inadvertent taps on the Trash button from either pre-iOS 13 muscle memory or from proximity to the Reply button.
I suspect not putting anything on the left of the message toolbar had to do with making room for “See More”. Not that I think this is a good idea!
I’ve been upset for months that I couldn’t long-press on the refresh button in Safari to turn off content blockers anymore and I just found this stupid menu hanging off a totally unrelated icon that I never press. Nice, Apple. Real nice.
Update (2020-03-27): Chance Miller (tweet):
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk knocked Apple during an event this week, criticizing the company’s recent updates for iOS.
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“What I was referring to is that technology does not automatically improve,” Musk said. “People are used to the phone being better every year. I’m an iPhone user, but I think some of the recent software updates have like been not great, certainly feeding into that point. It, like, broke my email system. . .which is quite fundamental.”
1 Comment RSS · Twitter
I've been getting a lot of mysterious battery use on iOS 13 and I've just discovered the Mail app is one of the culprits: it's been using up to 6 minutes of time, every single hour, despite having no mail accounts set up in it!
What could it possibly be doing for that long without any accounts configured? Why is it even running? What a mess. And this is on iOS 13.1.2.
