Today Google announced an improved experience for writing emails on Gmail web interface for iPad. When you write an email you’ll now get a big full screen compose window instead of splitting the screen between your inbox and the compose view. More text is visible at once and there are no more distractions with messages on the side. Thats straight from Googles mobile blog, from Craig Wilkinson on the Google Mobile team. They’ve also fixed the problems that prevented scrolling on long messages, and they thanked everyone who reported that through the Send feedback option at the bottom of the screen. So yes, complaining does work sometimes!!
Now the catch. The new interface is only in US English for now, so if your Gmail is set to something else you’ll have to sit tight. Nothing to install either. Just open Safari on your iPad and go to gmail.com.
Google is calling this series The Iterative Web App and this compose window is the first item on it. They say they are still experimenting with the large touchscreen and tablet form factor and want more suggestions. Gmail only got its iPad look in early April when the iPad went on sale, so things are moving quick here. Stay tuned.
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: googlemobile.blogspot.com, macrumors.com, macstories.net, fortune.com, thenextweb.com.
