Kiwi for Gmail Lite App Reviews

The beauty of having a gmail client or app is that it does everything that gmail does, but doesn’t add stuff on that encumbers gmail. Thanks for creating this, you’ve made using mail easier.

This is a good app, it allows me to do all I would normally do in Gmail. Unfortunately, ir does not have a Mobile App (for iOS), which makes it of limited value for me (useful only when I use my Mac). Too bad - it would be a great alternative to all email clients I use.

We use Google Apps for Education at my school. Kiwi is the perfect app for this—the fact that I can open Google Docs right from Kiwi without another browser loading is FANTASTIC! Performance is great. I hate using a browser for email (though likely this is some chrome type module). This is the exact program I need for what I am using Google Apps for.

Simple, straight-forward. Only downside is when there is a form to be filled in your message, don’t try to fill it out there, as that does not get transmitted.

What the developers were thinking when they sent this out the door, I’ll never know. In the first minute of opening the app on El Capitan: Bug 1: Segment violation while displaying the introductory screens. Bug 2: “Click or press 1, 2, or 3 to specify account” when there is only one account. Bug 3: Not accepting a key press in answer to the window displayed in Bug 2. I give up. I thought that software was supposed to be tested before being released into the stream of commerce. I guess I’m old school, and that “ship before test” is the way to do business. Avoid this mess until the programmers get back from their cigarette break.

Not sure why this app is necessary. It does not give you offline access and is simply a browser window view into Gmail. They layout is identical to what you see in the browser, and there is nothing truly unique that I could figure out comes with the app other than the ability to easily switch between accounts - which is not available in the free version. In short, not what I was looking for.

Im a big fan of this app. I have found that Gmail can take up quite a lot of resources when open in a browser and can get hidden in the mess of tabs that often exist in all my browser windows. At a conference I had to stop leaving my Gmail open because it cut my battery life on my 11" Macbook Air by 3 hours, so effectively I was cut off from easy chatting and email unless I was willing to burn some battery. Ive found that Kiwi doesnt use anywhere near as much battery/RAM/tab space as using Gmail in a browser. So far so good, keep making the app better please!

I tried them all, this one is the keeper. Kiwi works efficiently in the background and delivers familiar, uncluttered usability. Happy Mac user wouldn’t change it for anything.

The lite version basically replicates the web browser version with a little more integration to the desktop. It is simple and fast to use. At the price (free) how could anyone complain.

I find I like having this kind of access to seperate gmail accounts. It does freeze moderately (a couple times a week). But I find that overall it is worth dealing with that fairly minor inconvenience. Also, I’m just starting to use the command to compose an email from anywhere using keyboard shortcuts. That is pretty cool. I would recommend this app.

This app works for me nicely but recently I accidentally hit google’s “auto-redirect to Inbox” switch in gmail, and having done that kiwi would never load. I can live with this for now since my email load is manageable without Inbox. However, one, I assume inbox is Google’s intended future email client and two, the Inbox auto-classifying function is really handy such that I wish you could support that now. (Also, the error message when I made the Inbox-redirect mistake was non-obvious - that, at a minimum needs fixing.) So only 4 stars. The app would be get 5 stars if it had Inbox support.

For so long, I’ve been dissatisfied with my Mac apps for email - from the native mail client to second-party apps like Sparrow. Worse, I didn’t want to open my browser any time that I needed to access email. At last, here’s the solution! This interface is simple and easy to use - looking a lot like my web browser gmail - and is non-obtrusive on my Mac. Dare I say, it actually seems to work better and quicker than any of my other apps that I use for email. I’m doing the free version currently, but am thinking I’m going to pony up the $ to get the regular version, migrating all my accounts over to this platform. Thanks so much!

Amazing email program. Best layout for those used to the google interface.

Been using Kiwi for a couple weeks now and I love it! You get the GMAIL we experience, on your desktop. Love it! No complaints yet. Going to purchase a license.

I am a Regular International Business Traveller, and by far, is the best mail app for Gmail+MacBook users. Really expecting the new version, which will include extensions, such as boomerang.

I have used Kiwi Lite for about a week now. It’s a fantastic app—it loads quickly, it doesn’t eat up much RAM or bandwidth, it lets you know when you have a new message, and despite all of that, it stays out of your face. Kiwi hasn’t once tried to bother me, not even about upgrading to the full version (which I fully intend to do). As a multi-account user, I’m looking forward to the paid version, which should be an absolute game-changer for my workflow—no more keeping three browsers open for different gmail accounts. The interface is identical to the official GMail website—I keep pressing Command-T to open new tabs after I read messages because I forget I’m not in a browser! You can change your settings, mess with Google Labs features, play with themes—from what I can tell, if it works in gmail, it’ll work in Kiwi. My only, very minor, complaints, relate to the window interface and the typefaces. Kiwi uses a (very subtle) interface at the top of the window, with a glossy green and drop shadows that clash with the matte stoplights that recent versions of OS X use. Further, some of the typefaces used in the settings section of the interface are serif, when they’re sans-serif on the web version. Those are seriously the biggest problems I’ve found with the app so far, which should give you an idea of what a great little program it is. If you use gmail on a Mac, you owe it to yourself to twy Kiwi.

I would rate this at 5 stars…but for a single fatal flaw: while composing a new email (or replying to an existing one), if you need to attach a file, a blank “phantom” window opens, and everything in the application is frozen. You can’t enter a file name to attach, and you can’t kill the attachment. All you can do is quit. Thankfully, a draft is saved, but it’s a PITA to go back to the native MAIL app, read the draft, and do the attach there. I want a seamless, error-free app, with speed. I have no problems with the speed of KiwiLite (Apple’s MAIL app is painfully slow), but if it can’t do basic attachments of images, Word docs, or PDFs, then it’s useless.

Update: Kiwi support advises that the redirect (see below) only happens once, to “close the loop” and let them know that a downloaded copy of the app has been installed. This is consistent with my experience: I only saw this happen once. Good eye catching it the first time, I guess. But it’s still sneaky, and “not ok” for Kiwi to grab a link to one of my attachments. Have the app make a web service call on first launch. There are cleaner (and less surprising) ways to do this. Kiwi promises a privacy/security statement “soon” on their web site. I hope they find a different way to close the loop, because this leaves a bit of a bad taste. === I hate having to have a browser window perpetually open for Gmail. Other desktop clients have been disappointing. Kiwi is simply a native app wrapper around the Gmail web app - precisely what I want! Launch Calendar like you normally would (click the grid next to your username and pick Calendar) and a second Kiwi window opens containing your calendar. They’re based on a Chrome webview, but appear separate from your browser in the dock. I’ve died and gone to OCD heaven. :-) Two snags: (1) Acknowledged in Kiwi release notes: sometimes after having Kiwi open for a while I’ll click on a link to view an attachment or a new window to compose a mail and I’ll get a transparent window. For some reason the contents don’t render but you can see the window’s outline. Guess where the “close” button is and you can get it to go away, but you’ll need to quit and restart Kiwi to fix it. (2) I only saw this once, but following a link to an attachment in an e-mail, I saw a Kiwi-controlled redirect page to take me to my own Google Drive content. This isn’t cool - unless Kiwi has disabled HTTP server logging (and why would they?), they’re (knowingly or unknowingly) harvesting links to my own private content. Kiwi - is there a reason I need to use your redirection endpoint to follow links in my own e-mail? This is really not cool, and will be the reason I stop using it. (So close, but too good to be true?)

I love that this app does what it promises to do and delivers on that, simply. Well done.

Really a fan, something about having the actual gmail client fast and responsive but unshackled from the browser is really sweet. Gives notifications, acts as a default mail client (so you can actually click on a mailto link, and doesn’t take forever to download messages. I use this at work in an environment where i have an average of 60-70k conversations in an average month, and Kiwi does a fantastic job!