Yahoo Mail gets mobile web overhaul and launches for Android Go

Yahoo Mail might not be as popular as it once was, but with more than 227 monthly active users worldwide and 26 billion emails passing through its servers daily, it’s still one of the most widely used email platforms on the planet. Rather than rest on its laurels, Yahoo is launching two new initiatives aimed at improving Mail’s usability on mobile devices: a redesigned dashboard for smartphone web browsers and a new app optimized for phones running Android Go, a variant of Google’s operating system optimized for low-end devices.

Both the new Yahoo mobile web experience and Android Go app are available today.

“By 2025, the number of global mobile internet users is predicted to expand by over 50%,” Joshua Jacobson, senior director of product management at Verizon subsidiary Yahoo, wrote in a blog post. “We believe it is important to understand and meet the specific needs of this massive wave of new mobile users, and deliver the same first-class Yahoo Mail experience regardless of device, location, storage capacity, or network speeds.”

To that end, Yahoo on mobile browsers no longer reloads on actions like deleting messages and emptying the trash, and it inherits features from the Yahoo Mail app like the option to choose between light and dark backgrounds, a redesigned sidebar menu with quick access to folders, and an infinite scrolling inbox. There’s also a new easy-access toolbar with shortcuts for deleting, replying to, and forwarding messages, as well as an auto-suggest feature in the email composition screen that surfaces the most frequently used addresses in your contact list.

Above: The new Yahoo mobile web experience.

Image Credit: Yahoo

Behind the scenes, the Yahoo Mail team brought the mobile web app in line with the desktop Mail experience by updating the underlying JavaScript code and frameworks. It was developed on React and Redux and built using Node.js and AJAX, and it features an update mechanism that delivers the most current code base whenever the inbox launches.

The goal was to make Yahoo Mail on mobile browsers feel “virtually indistinguishable” from the app, explained Jacobson. Android users can even add an app-like shortcut to their phones’ home screen that links directly to Yahoo Mail on the web.

“By introducing smooth transitions, an updated design, modern fonts, and native-like interaction animations, Yahoo Mail mobile browser takes what users love about our app experience and brings it to the web,” Jacobson wrote.

Yahoo Mail’s other new product is aimed at a different crowd. It’s a new app — Yahoo Mail for Android Go — that’s optimized for devices running Android Go.

The Android Go version of Yahoo Mail is based on the same architecture as the standard Yahoo Mail app. It uses a minimal amount of RAM and less than 10MB of storage space. Despite the smaller footprint, though, it offers the same array of features as the full-blown app.

“The Yahoo Mail Go app delivers the same […] features enjoyed by our current Android app users,” Jacobson wrote. “In fact, the original Yahoo Mail app is already extremely lightweight, so we didn’t … [have to] compromise on performance.”