In a recent article for the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo makes a good point about email, it's broken. Yet, email is the most commonly used and therefore most important communication tool because it is not app-specific. One can use a number of different apps to access email, and more importantly, the person with whom you exchange email does not need to use the same app as you, and this is a fundamental difference between all the other services except for SMS text messaging. 

In most cases to use Slack, WhatsApp, Skype, or Facebook Messenger, all parties involved in the communication have to use those same apps and that is a big hurdle. It is why Facebook is firmly entrenched, enough of your friends are there to keep you using it despite how much you hate it.

In other words, for something to replace email it has to be a server-based solution open for access to a wide range of different apps to increase the probability a person's app of choice works. Unfortunately, technology is much more siloed today than ever before and consequently email will remain one of the sole common denominators. (If Apple were serious about iMessage, it would have gone ahead and made it open to work with other apps on other platforms, or at least created an Android version of iMessage. Instead, Apple treats iMessage as a carrot to lure more people to iOS, which means iMessage has no chance of replacing email.) 

Thus, we are left with email and therefore any hope for improving email lies in alternative email apps rather than replacing email "the service." We are starting to see apps adding AI and other features that hopefully make it easier to quickly review and process email.  

I find myself to be in the minority in liking Google's Inbox app, most people stick with the "standard" Gmail. I like how Inbox bundles emails and provides a quick way for me to scan and archive them as a bundle rather than individually, which enables me to process email faster. Google also recently added a suggested replies feature that speeds up sending replies to messages.

Other companies continue to work on creating a better email app. Notion is a new one that I just learned about, and it is the first email app that I have seen that claims to add AI. I am going to try it out to see how well it works and whether it works better than Inbox.