Email differences on Android

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Sometime recently Android updated how email is potentially rendered as a user preference in the gmail app. As you can see above there’s now a way to auto-fit content into the window instead of having it go way past the screen edge.  For whatever reason this was never a standard thing and I’m not actually sure why it still isn’t one.

What’s ridiculous however, is that if you also use the Email app as I do for work / exchange mail there is no such option and as you can see the rendering is pretty sub par.

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For comparison I enclosed a shot from the gmail app as well. Users of iOS devices know this has always worked well and are probably just shaking their heads …I can’t help but think there are actual differences between how WebKit is being utilized across the system. The apple way is simple, it works. The android way leads to these differences … perhaps this is what’s also causing the issues I’m seeing with copying rich content in the clipboard.

Android’s Clipboard is Somehow Lacking

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Using any device I’ve found that it’s impossible to copy and paste rich content through the clipboard. I’ve seen this in the browser (Chrome) and Pocket. Even in Pocket, where you can email a full article view, images are still missing. On iPhone I can regularly capture full web content to email … I do this many times a day actually for article sharing and find it’s strangely limited on Android.

I’m running the latest Jelly Bean on a Nexus 7, Galaxy Nexus and have CM10 running on a Galaxy Note.