Outlook for iOS

Imagine my excitement when I heard (from everyone) that Microsoft finally released Outlook for iOS. My email is split between Exchange (real Exchange, not 365) for work and IMAP for everything else. There is exactly one iOS mail client that supports those two systems effectively.1 With the release of Outlook for iOS, that number remains unchanged.

Surprisingly, Outlook for iOS supports Dropbox, Box, Yahoo, iCloud and GMail. Adding attachments is very convenient and seeing a list of all attachments from my inbox in one view is helpful. But the lack of IMAP support is surprising. Search is abysmal on a large mail collection. There is no support for Outlook Tasks in the iOS client.

To their credit, Outlook is a nice enough, if mildly boring, email and calendar client. Scheduled email is an interesting idea but not something I’m accustom to. The calendar options are particularly anemic and lack any support for setting meeting rooms.

So, no IMAP and the bare minimum of Exchange support means I will not be using Outlook for iOS beyond this morning’s self-tour. I’ll check back to see how development goes, but this is not terribly useful to me. Maybe my expectations were too high, but since they invented Exchange, I hoped for possibilities greater than a app made by two people in a coffee shop.

  1. Congratulations if you guessed Mail.app. You win a basket of disappointment. No other email client supports corporate Exchange authentication required for my job. Mail and Outlook for iOS are the only two out of the dozens that I’ve tried. ↩︎