Acompli for Android

An average way to manage your email

Acompli is designed to be a one stop shop for all your productivity needs, combining email, calendar and cloud file management in one app. Sounds promising, but is it any good?

A useful productivity tool

One area where Acompli excels is that it seamlessly integrates different productivity tools. This means you can, for example, easily switch between your email and calendar, or check out what files you've uploaded to your Dropbox account and attach these to an email.

Another useful feature (in theory) is that it provides you with a 'focused' inbox for your most important email and an 'other' inbox for all the rest. However, these are the only two categories you can use to filter your emails, which is fewer than Gmail (which has categories for social, promotions, and more). I also couldn't figure out how to move emails between boxes.

Being able to connect your Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive accounts is great for managing your files, as you can attach them to emails and download them to your device. You can also add different calendars and switch between them to make sure you never miss an appointment again. Your contacts are also stored in the app, although you can only view them in a list, which makes finding the right person pretty tricky.

The customizable notifications means you get far more control over your email and calendar in many apps. You can chose to only receive notifications from your focused inbox and then switch calendar notifications on and off. The ability to schedule your email to deal with later is the most unique feature Acompli offers, adding a kind of to-do list element.

Takes some getting used to

The left sidebar menu makes it easy to switch between your email, calendar files, and contacts, as they all have a separate option within that menu. However, managing different email accounts proved trickier, as I could only see all the individual folders in the first account I added. In other accounts only the main inbox was visible, not the sent items, trash, spam etc.

Acompli won't win any prizes for the way it looks. The user interface is very stark, dull, and not particularly attractive. Its user experience pales in comparison to other email applications, such as Gmail. In the left sidebar menu the writing is particularly small. I also found it to be slow and sluggish at times and, after adding more than one email account, it crashed frequently.

It's also not an easy app to get up and running on quickly. Take adding an account as an example, this option is hidden away in the settings menu when really it should be front and center.

Even worse, after many tries, I couldn't connect my Hotmail account. Given that this is my most used personal account, it makes the app pretty much useless to me. Then I tried to add my Yahoo account. While this seemed to have worked, Acompli wouldn't load any of the messages. Then it displayed 207 unread messages in my Gmail when in the Google app, while I only, in fact, had six.

All substance and no style

Overall, Acompli is more feature rich than it is easy to use or attractive. While there are lots of useful functions, not being able to add two major email accounts after many tries is a major flaw and the user experience still needs a lot of work. It has potential, but it isn't an app I'd recommend in its current format.