March 8, 2016

The Sortd Mobile App Has Arrived

Manage your Sortd data on the go. The long awaited Sortd mobile app is here! Available on the iOS & Android app stores.

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Sortd Mobile App

Finally, there's a companion mobile app to access and change your Sortd data on the go. It's currently just for managing work that you have already added to your Sortd board. You can do all the basics like adding tasks to your lists, opening and responding to emails, updating notes, completing items, moving in and between lists etc.

The first thing you will ask yourself when you open this app is "Where is the inbox?" and you are probably going to wonder what's the point. It is, however, an early version. More than anything the Sortd mobile app is going to be useful for seeing what's on your plan, and marking tasks and emails complete as you get through them. We will continue to invest in the app to improve it over time, but for now it will work for most of what you need.

Not adding an Inbox to the Sortd app was a decision that we did not take lightly, and I'll be completely transparent with you to give you some insight into our thinking.

When we created Sortd, the entire concept was based on the notion that you can manage work in a visually organized workspace without the need to switch from Gmail to a new email client. Our philosophy when it comes to mobile is no different, only it's not yet technically viable to integrate with the Gmail app the same way that do with the desktop version.

We have reason to believe that this will change as the Gmail team add better support for third party integrations. So for now rather than investing our resources in re-creating the basic Gmail functionality you already have (which took Gmail themselves years to build), to only then be able to add the Sortd stuff on top of it - just didn't make sense.

Instead we are going to focus our attention on getting the desktop experience to be even more useful.

If the lack of an Inbox leaves you feeling a little uneasy, I would encourage you to think about what you actually need on your mobile (vs what you do when you are at your computer). Personally, when giving that question real consideration I recognized that what I need from an email app on my mobile is quite different to what I need when I'm sitting at my computer. I need to be able to go through my Inbox to see what's new, easily delete and archive as I go to clean up, and fire back a quick response to the emails that I can deal with quickly.

I also need to be able to add to my lists when something pops into my head and to see what's on my agenda, so it's important to be able to access my tasks on my mobile. It's also great to have the convenience of being able to open and reply to email right there - which the Sortd app does.

Everything considered, it meets 90% of my needs when I'm on the go. The real work happens at my computer, where it makes more sense to plan and manage my priorities when I can see them on a large screen in context of everything else.

If you are wondering how you then add an email to your board without access to your Inbox - it is possible to do that from the Gmail app itself with the use of labels that Sortd automatically adds. If you want to know more about how to do that, please read this post on 'Importing' emails into Sortd.

The Sortd app is available for download in both the iOS and Android app stores.


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Play App Store Badge


Written by
Wayne Silbermann