Kiwi for Gmail App Reviews

I’ve been using Kiwi for about 9 months. The first few months were great, with minimal issues or bugs, however the more recent versions seem to be way more unstable and it crashes multiple times per week. I often notice it consumes a significant amount of cpu and memory. I’ve also run into annoying bugs like a blank dialog window when trying to attach a file to an email or the app hangs when clicking on a link in an email. I hope the major update addresses these issues or I’ll be forced to find a new app.

I think the best part of this app is the UI and Do Not Disturb feature. Outside of these elements, the app is not that different than the basic gmail browser interface.

I do love having it work as an email client rather than a broswer winder. It just feels more natural rather than 100% web integration. I like how it does all the gmail functions ordinarily reserved for Chrome browser. I have found it to be a bit buggy occasionally. I have three accounts going on it. The status bar notification will show messages in a particular account, but when I click on it, I get a blank screen. I have to force quit the app and start over, and then it works flawlessly until that happens again. Still a very minor glitch and the good far outweighs the glitch. BUt it keeps from from giving it 5 stars.

Overall I really like this email app! I often times check my gmail through a browser at work, and it was getting confusing to organize my email through the web browser and Mac mail. Since this is organized exactly like the gmail web browser, it is really easy to arrange things in folders and find emails again. A couple of annoying things I’ve found though: - Sometimes the app will stall, particularly when I switch between the two pages of my different email accounts. Sometimes I’ll get just a blank screen and will have to force quit the application to make it run again. - When someone sends you a link to google docs, it’ll open up the google doc page in a separate window within the Kiwi app, rather than an actual browser window (in Safari, chrome, etc). The Kiwi window isn’t resizeable and doesn’t allow scrolling. I wish that it would just open the google doc in safari

Stops working every now and then. I have four email accounts and not all of them work all the time. I have to keep going in and deleting the email account then adding it again. For an app that was supposed to make things easier it’s giving me more work. I Apple products. Is this why? Should I return to PC just for this app? What gives Kiwi?

Fantastic email client. Perfect fit for my laptop

I have two gmail accounts I want to access without browser and this app promised to do that so I paid my money and gave it a shot. It worked great for a couple hours and I was able to toggle back and forth between personal gmail and business gmail account just fine. Then I clicked to go back and the screen was totally blank for one of my accounts. I got it to work again by choosing “quit” and restarting the app. After doing this several times I finally said enough is enough and removed the app from my startup at login. Keep your $10 everyone.

As someone who runs about 7 accounts, this app is fanatastic. I see that some folks say it’s not perfect, and perhaps it’s not - it seems like a shell over Safari. Either way, it’s great - and I’m happy to buy a copy and support the development.

This app had a few bugs at first but since their last update I have had no issues whatsoever. With my multiple gmail accounts, this has been a life-saver. I’m able to check all my mail in one place that that’s a tremendous time saver. Great tool!

I have multiple google accounts. It is a must for me to have an app like this. I am generally pleased, but the application does freeze. I have to restart it every day or two. I’d happily give it a four or five if they fixed the freezing

So I used the free version for a few days without issues. Then, I bought the full version so I could add my work email address. Plenty of bugs. Sometimes the window is blank. I contacted support and was told it is a known issue and their suggestion was to close and reopen the app. What?! Unacceptable. It also just randomly crashes and needs to be restarted. Sometimes it freezes and you can’t even tell, or know for how long it was frozen. I have to keep the Apple Mail app open along side this just to ensure I am getting my mail notifications correctly. I am shocked that they charge people for this. I am not your beta tester. I paid for this app and I can’t even use it. One wild thing I noticed is that I see their Ads on Facebook all the time (where I found out about it). If you comment on there they will respond to your comment then wait a couple of hours and delete your comment. They did it to mine when I mentioned the price and I saw another comment disappear as well. My comment and the other were both negative. Summary: Don’t buy this trying to increase productivity. Buy this only if you don’t mind your email not working perfectly.

You talking to me? I don’t know how you are anymore.

I have several gmail accounts and it gets old signing in and out of all of them in order to access my mail. So, this app is a significant improvement on my workflow. However, I am annoyed by the fact that one account or the other always seems to freeze requiring me to restart the app in order to get into it. After an update or two, and the keyboard STILL freezes after the app has been open for a while. Really irritating. Still it’s better than having to sing out of an account in order to sign into another one. If I find something else, I’ll definitely switch especially since they aren’t going to be updating the app anymore, for my OS (Yosemite OSX 10.10.5)

Purchased this app, set up my first account, and it will only display the page telling me to make sure that I have the latest browser. I run the latest Safari. It sends me in to the help system with no clear way to get OUT of that system and to my email. Completely, 100% useless software. And! It crashed as soon as I managed to figure out where to send an email (the in-box still will not display). Did I mention completely useless?

I primarily bought Kiwi because I have multiple gmail accouns and I hated the login / logout process. Kiwi takes care of that for me. The rest is bonus for me. I see others have had issues, but I haven’t had any.

In theory this is a really good app however it crashes a lot especially when using shortcuts for composing new email, etc. Hopefully they’ll work the bugs out. I like how easy it is to switch between my 5 accounts. Also like that is oppens a lot more quickly than the browser version of gmail.

What’s the point of this app if it basically mimics the web version? I was hoping it would bring in some standard email client features sorely lacking in the GMail product - especially around de-bundling emails rather than making them long continuous single email strings. If you are using gmail for business it is basicaly impossible to really establish timelines and the order of emails and responses. This is basic in every email client like ever - outlook, aol, yahoo, mac mail, etc. My biggest complaint with gmail is when certain emails come through and the body requires you scroll to the right because the content won’t wrap properly. When I downloaded the Kiwi app that was the first thing I looked for and it was the same as in my browser…so yeah, these are pain points that make using kiwi not much better than gmail for web. Basically, it seems to assume that everyone just LOVES gmail except that it isn’t an email client app but that isn’t really the case. Most of us use Gmail because it’s cheap and has a lot of storage and/or we use it at work and it isn’t business friendly at all and we tolerate the lack of standard email product features that have been around forever for a reason. Honestly, whatever the next big major update is - I hope it addresses some of the frustrating gmail product functionality and features deficiencies.

Love having a dedicated email program, but it needs to be updated. All this is really doing is taking me to the gmail webpage, and even then it hasn’t been updated, so I can’t use the gmail “inbox” feature and links to google docs don’t work. Simple concept. Needs to work.

Having been through a few email clients, bouncing between thunderbird, Apple mail, Postbox, and even the Microsoft Outlook, all of them have some weaknesses. The main motivation being that the Apple Mail client built into OS-X installs at times has some horribly broken behavior with large imap accounts, and since almost all my email is hosted by Google (main gmail account, and three domains I use Google Apps for) if there is wonkiness, then I am miserable. I have at times just relied on the web app, but it is a pain to keep tabs open on my browser. Enter Kiwi for Gmail. It encapsulates the gmail native web interface into a stand alone application. It appears to use Safari to render, and it is pretty slick. It does make it a lot easier to properly archive and label email (the Google system uses labels in lieu of actual folders, and that is what the different versions of Apple Mail breaks). I currently have 5 accounts, and it is pretty good to work between them for my accounts. It uses the classic Gmail interface, not the newer “Inbox” paradigm, but I am not entirely sold on that evolution. It supposedly integrates well with the Google Drive for sending large files. Not something I use, so I have no experience with it. Since it is just a web interface, there isn’t a locally cached store of email. Many people might think this is a negative, but it isn’t for me. It did allow me to clear off almost 15 gigabytes of cached mailboxes, a not trivial percentage of my MacBook Air’s SSD. The bad: Alas, the program gets frozen a coupel times a day, and unresponsive. A quit/restart and all is back to normal, not a terrible deal. FWIW, Apple Mail crashed a couple times a week with a couple of my Google Gmail accounts, so I am not complaining too loudly. When I bought it, it was mentioned that a major update was coming soon, so I will come back and re-review when that drops on me.

Good app and I would love to be able to give it 5 stars but crashing 3 - 5 times a day just isn’t acceptable. Offline mode would also be a huge plus, but please get the app stable first.