Swiping is decidedly less preferable for me when reviewing a lot of emails. Removing buttons is not necessarily better UX.
However what is much worse is that swiping is broken on any HTML email that renders wider than the screen; “swiping” becomes moving the viewport left and right.
There was nothing broken about the arrows. Please restore or at least make it an option in settings.
Stuart
Is it really broken? When the message is wider than the screen, holding down the finger and dragging it across the screen scrolls the message like you’d expect from e.g. a browser. Swiping to the next/previous message works if you’ve reached the corresponding edge of the content, lift the finger, then put it down again and drag it in the direction of the next/previous message.
You can avoid having to scroll the content all the way to the left or right edge by starting the swipe gesture outside the message body, e.g. on the message header.
Having a lot of different options adds quite a bit of complexity. There are many areas inside the app that already suffer from too many options. Every time such code is touched there’s a decent chance that we spend much more time on it than should be necessary or that we accidentally break an optional feature (or both). That’s why we’re very careful and the answer to “just make it a setting” is usually “no”.
I don’t think this issue is important enough to warrant the cost of adding an optional navigation mechanism.
Swiping on header works much better, yes.
I’m not used to working with the header area that way, but perhaps this is a common ux gesture in other mail mobile apps. I wouldn’t know because I only use k9…
Reporting back …
You can avoid having to scroll the content all the way to the left or right edge by starting the swipe gesture outside the message body, e.g. on the message header
This does not work for me now, not sure if something broke recently.
If a message body is wider than the screen you cannot use the header area at all to swipe right to previous message.
So again – it worked better with the arrows, it’s a more complex and fragile mechanism now.