Enhancements (deferred)#

Ideas that came up during design but are explicitly out of scope for v1. Listed here so future-us has a record of what’s been considered and why it was deferred.

Richer cards#

v1 cards show sender + subject + received time. There’s a lot of room to make them feel more designed:

schema.org structured data. Many big senders (Amazon, airlines, banks, ride-share, food delivery, hotels) embed JSON-LD specifically so Gmail can render typed cards inline. Free, standardised, and covers a large fraction of bulk transactional email. A “shipping” card looks different from a “bill” card.
Brand logos / favicons keyed off sender domain.
Brand-themed cards for known senders: brand colours, logo prominence.
Hero images from email bodies, with heuristics to avoid tracking pixels and spacer GIFs.
Product images looked up externally for transactional emails referencing specific items.
Visual distinction for personal email vs transactional — contact photo, DM-style layout, different visual weight.

Deferred because v1 needs to ship as a “dumb version” first, and most of these enhancements depend on Gmail API scopes the project may never have (see gmail-verification-wall.md).

On-device AI summarisation#

When the basics are working, AI summaries become the obvious next layer. The intent is on-device only: bundle a small model (Phi-3.5-mini, Gemma 2 2B, or similar) and run it via CoreML; use Apple Intelligence’s Foundation Models framework on devices that support it.

Background processing is the latency mitigation: summarise as email arrives, not as it’s viewed. By the time the user opens the app, the feed is pre-rendered.

Cloud-based AI was rejected (cost, data controller concerns) — see architecture.md.

Smarter notifications#

v1 sends generic “you’ve got mail” local notifications. With on-device intelligence the app could:

Highlight emails it perceives as important.
Surface specific content in the notification (“Your package arrives tomorrow”).
Stay quiet for low-value mail.

“Cleanup” rail option#

A rail action that lets the user apply a rule derived from the current email — “archive everything from this sender,” “delete all marketing from the last month,” “unsubscribe and clean up the back catalogue.” A way to bring an already-chaotic inbox under control without manual scrolling.

Aggressive auto-archive on scroll-past#

A settings-level option for users who’ve come to trust the app: scrolling past = archive, not just mark-seen. Off by default.

Multi-account#

Multiple Gmail accounts unified in one feed.