Why Gmail is Losing Its Popularity

Gmail’s popularity

Gmail’s popularity is falling off a cliff. In September of 2021, they controlled 35.25% of the market. But by October of 2022, they only controlled 27.95% of the market. This means that within these 13 months, Gmail’s market share fell by a whopping 7.3%. This might not seem like a large amount at first glance, but it is when you consider that basically everyone with an internet connection uses email.

There’s estimated to be about 4.26 billion email users worldwide. So, this means that Gmail either lost 306 million users or the people who are opening new email accounts are choosing the other email clients by far. It’s probably some sort of combination of both, but why? Ever since Gmail launched, the consensus has been that Gmail is the go-to email client. Whether we’re talking about personal use, business use, or fake email use, Gmail has been the bomb.

I would even argue that some of the other email clients have had a negative stigma surrounding them, especially Yahoo and Hotmail. So, how did Gmail go from being the go-to email service to losing a fifth of their market share within a year?

The appeal of Gmail

To understand why Gmail is losing so much market share, we’ll first have to understand why they were so popular in the first place. And for this, we’ll have to go back to April Fools’ Day of 2004. If you didn’t know, Gmail was actually launched as kind of a joke. In fact, Sundar Pichai, the current CEO of Google, was interviewing with Google at the time. And when interviewers asked him about his thoughts on Gmail, even he thought that it was just an April Fools’ Day joke.

The main reason that this theory was so popular was because Gmail’s offering was simply laughably absurd. At the time, Yahoo and Hotmail offered 2MB of storage and 5MB of storage respectively. So, when Google came out with 1 GB of storage on April Fools’ Day, people assumed that it was surely a joke.

But, April Fools’ Day came and left, and Gmail was still operational. This definitely caught people by surprise, but Google was just getting started. In 2005, they would increase the storage to two GB, and in 2007, they would increase the storage to four GB.

Very quickly, Gmail went from being a joke to being the most desirable email client. I don’t think I have to tell you the horrors of trying to ensure that your entire email archive is less than 2 or 5 MB. But, storage was just the first of many advantages of Gmail. Gmail also boasted the best spam filters, the best UI, convenient grouping, and the ability to actually search through your email. Yes, the other popular services didn’t even let you search.

But, while everyone wanted Gmail, not very many people could actually get it, and this brings us to the second appeal of Gmail, which was scarcity. Here’s the thing, offering these crazy storage spaces that were magnitudes above the competition turned out to be extremely hard. So, they had to heavily limit the number of users that used the service.

For most companies, this would’ve been a major scaling bottleneck, but Google actually made it an advantage by making Gmail invite-only. People could only open a Gmail account if they were invited by someone who already had a Gmail account. So, if you had a Gmail account, you were very much the cool kid in the friend group.

It wasn’t till nearly three years after the initial launch that Google made Gmail available to everyone. By this point, most people who didn’t yet have a Gmail account were dying to switch, so Gmail’s market share continued skyrocketing. It wasn’t just everyday people who craved Gmail either.

Google was very much getting schools and institutions on board as well, once again thanks to their features. For institutions, Google offered custom domain names, zero scheduled downtime for maintenance, 30 GB of storage up to unlimited storage based on your plan, and 24/7 phone and email support. Once again, Google blew the competition out of the water, so switching was a no-brainer.

But, this was basically the end of the era of voluntary Gmail adoption. While Gmail was indeed the superior choice, much of the adoption that followed in the 2010s was forced adoption.

Forced adoption

For people who had already bought into the Google ecosystem, Google’s strategies throughout the 2010s probably seemed completely harmless. But, for the people who didn’t buy into their ecosystem, well, it was definitely a pain in the neck. What Google started doing was merging all of their platforms and requiring that you have a single Google account for all of them.

This probably doesn’t seem like a big deal today, but back in the day, people got pretty heated about this. And likely the biggest culprit was Google+. If you’re not familiar with Google+, I don’t blame you because it ended up being a massive failure. Google+ was basically Google’s attempt at growing their own social media platform and competing against Facebook.

It seems harmless at first glance, but the problem was that instead of enticing people to join Google+ because of its features, Google forced Google+ down people’s throats.

For example, in 2011, Google modified the Gmail account creation process such that you had to create a Google+ profile, and this was the case up until 2014. I think you can see why this would be annoying, but this wasn’t even close to being their worst infraction.

Likely their worst infraction was their policy regarding YouTube comments. In 2013, YouTube mandated that people must have Google+ accounts if they wanted to leave comments. For obvious reasons, people were enraged and even YouTube’s cofounder Jawed Karim would call out Google. Jawed would post quote, “Why the f do I need a Google+ account to comment on a video?” Despite all the backlash, Google wouldn’t untie YouTube and Google+ up until 2015.

While Google+ was no doubt the worst offender, the same fundamental argument was applicable to Gmail accounts as well. Google made it so that you needed a Gmail account if you wanted to do anything else on Google. Do you want to use Google Drive? Well, you’re gonna need a Gmail.

Do you want a YouTube account? Well, you’re gonna need a Gmail. Do you want to download apps from the Play Store? Well, you’re gonna need a Gmail. The funniest part was that this monopoly extended outside of Google’s services as well. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the “login with Google” feature.

While this feature is no doubt super convenient, it just further strengthened the Google monopoly and forced more people to get Gmails even if their use case had nothing to do with using Gmail for email.

A similar case could be made for the education side of Gmail as well. If universities wanted to run Google Ads or roll out schoolwide Google calendars, they needed a Google account, and they needed all their students to have Google accounts as well.

Now, technically, many Google features are available without having an account, but we all know that the services are way better if you have an account. Trying to use Google’s services without an account is like trying to use AirPods with a Windows computer. It works, but it’s not all that great.

The turning tide

All of this brings us to where we are today. Google has become one of the most dominant email clients in the world by leveraging features, scarcity, and forced adoption, but their dominance is slowly starting to fade away.

So, what’s happening?

Well, the answer is pretty simple. Google is running out of trump cards. Let’s start with features. One of Gmail’s original selling features was their massive storage, but the competition has not only caught up, they’ve actually overtaken Google. Take Outlook, for example. Outlook offers 15 GB of storage just for their email alone, and you get an additional 5 GB through OneDrive. So, Gmail is by no means leagues ahead of the competition anymore.

Moving onto Gmail’s second selling factor of scarcity, well, no one really thinks that having a Google account is cool anymore. It’s basically just the norm and everyone already has one. This also makes it extremely difficult for Google to force more adoption because there’s really no one left to convince.

Something else that we should mention is that Google was never really the ideal choice for students or professionals because you can’t leverage Microsoft Office as much. The reason that many schools and universities embraced Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets is because they made collaboration extremely convenient.

But, if you put the convenience and collaboration aspects aside, there’s no question that Microsoft Office is the superior service. And over the past 10 years, Microsoft has very much made strides with their own online office products and collaboration features. Microsoft Office online is actually free, but that doesn’t even matter to institutions because they usually already have a bunch of Office 365 subscriptions anyway.

So, many institutions are switching back to Outlook to create synergies between email, cloud storage, and Microsoft Office.

We should also mention that while schools and universities very much embraced Google, companies never did. In fact, nearly 196,000 companies in the US use Outlook while only 4,400 use Gmail. Another catalyst that has stolen market share away from Gmail is Apple’s recent Mail Privacy Protection program. This program makes it harder for email marketers to track down your IP address and your mail activity.

And in an age where everyone is worried about juggernauts like Google and Facebook collecting your data, it’s not surprising that people are taking every chance to protect themselves. This is made even easier by the fact that you don’t have to do anything to take advantage of this program.

In fact, it would be easier to take advantage of this program than not take advantage of it. All you have to do is use the inbuilt mail app on iPhones instead of downloading the Gmail app. And while people have been wary of the iPhone email app for years, it seems like this new feature is very much pushing people towards it, and we can see this in the market share data.

In September of 2021, Apple had 50% market share, but today they have nearly 60% market share. And I suspect that this will only grow with time as people become more aware of the importance of data protection.

The future of Gmail

At the end of the day, Gmail is by no means dying or becoming irrelevant. You very much still need a Gmail account to surf the internet freely. However, it does seem like people are using other services for email more and more frequently.

Some of the surface-level reasons for this are that competing email clients have caught up in terms of features, they have better integration with Microsoft Office, and Google has basically just reached market saturation. But, if we look beyond that, it appears that we’re seeing a larger trend towards privacy.

People are more aware than ever how these companies are able to offer their services for free and how they really make money. For example, here’s all the data that Google is able to collect just off of Gmail.

It appears that Apple has caught onto this consumer awareness, and they’re very much framing their business with this in mind. They’re positioning themselves as the big tech company that doesn’t collect data. This can be seen with their “Ask Not To Track” feature and their mail privacy protection program.

It’s not just Apple who’s jumping onto this trend either. In the messaging space, we have Signal, and in the social media space, we have BeReal. While these services offer completely different functionality, their core appeal is identical: erasing the bad aspects of big tech.

Given that Google already doesn’t have that much room to grow, I suspect that Gmail’s popularity will simply continue to trend downwards, but that’s just what I think. Which email client is your favorite? Comment that down below.