Shortwave - AI Email

What people write about

Direction describes a theme in aggregate. An individual review may differ — select a theme to inspect its star profile and every text.

loading the rest of the reviews

1. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Unreliable. Good idea but totally unreliable with a poorly architected backend. The back end keeps crashing on me with an error and no one can help. Now the Mac desktop app kept freezing my computer and bricking out. Tried everything and now I’m left with a mess because it doesn’t sync over.

2. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Scam. Had the same email for 15 years. Within 5 days of using this app, my email was logged into by other people who proceeded to steal all of my info and email my financial service companies attempting to transfer assets.

3. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Doesn't work. this app has such great potential, but it repeatedly fails at it's core functionality. What is supposed to add convenience to your life. Actually repeatedly creates inconveniences. Don't waste your time.

4. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

   No good email client. Shortwave email lacks essential features, such as unified inbox and support, no Microsoft emails, making it unworthy of subscription, even for business purposes.

5. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Useless. There’s no “all mail” view. The only way to find emails I’m expecting is to search for them.

6. ★★★★★login, signup and account access

   Can’t sign in. On first launch, the app tries to automatically sign into the wrong Gmail account. It’s trying to sign in with my child’s school account, and gets stuck because the app is blocked by the school. I don’t see a way to manually enter a different Gmail account, so the app is useless. It’s a real shame because I was pretty eager to try this one out.

7. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Wish I could give ZERO to match company’s concern for users. I spent hours setting up AI features and waiting for “ghost writer” to Scan my thousands of emails so it could write like me. Then one day none of the advertised AI features were available. Surely this violates App Store policies and the app should be BANNED from the App Store so that the developers cannot continue STEALING the $$$$ of the users

8. ★★★★★privacy and excessive permissions

   Privacy violators. They took my email address and started spamming me. Update: Newsletters have already been turned off in Settings. It looks like some employee was able to grab my email address and send me email. “ Browser not supported To use Shortwave, please update your browser to a more recent version and try again” “AI assistant for iOS” “multi select meet AI” “Reminders to follow up” Endless popups, unusable.

9. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

   Impossible to Unsubscribe. Shortwave intentionally makes it difficult to unsubscribe from paid versions of their app. Any time I go to downgrade to the free version, the app crashes requiring me to “contact support”. I’ve now been charged multiple times for this app that I don’t even use. Avoid at all costs — it’s redundant technology that is already being built into all of the major e-mail platforms.

10. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Months later, still no delete. I really want to use this app. There is a ton to like, but it has been months and there is still no way to delete an email. At this point I can’t really even believe the developers when they say they are working on it. It’s a total dealbreaker and one of the strangest situations I’ve seen in an iOS app.

11. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    iPad Layout - Portrait Only. I want to like it, but no landscape on iPad is a dealbreaker…

12. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Lack of delete kills this app. In the pursuit of Inbox 0, Shortwave misses badly with the omission of delete capabilities. Archive and pin. That's it. 90% of the email I receive is worth deleting after reading. I don't want the clutter in my search results. Delete wasn't included in the MLP (Most Lovable Product), and makes this a MDP (Most Deleted Product). Instant delete from my apps. The search for a capable email client continues.

13. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Completely useless on iPad. No landscape support on iPad? Regardless of having a keyboard attached who on earth would use the iPad touch keyboard in portrait mode? Didn’t even get in to try out the functionality due to this.

14. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Landscape support?. I would love to love this app, but on an iPad Pro, the inability to use in landscape mode has made this app utterly useless. I will keep checking back to see if that functionality is added, but for now, I will have to continue my search for a better alternative.

15. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Non-starter on iPad. Love the idea and happy someone brought this idea back. Sadly, can’t use it on my iPad since it doesn’t do landscape. When that changes, I will give it another chance.

16. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    IPad app forces portrait mode. Using on my iPad Pro with magic keyboard, and the app is stuck in portrait mode. Apparently these developers haven’t used an iPad since 2010. An email app, that doesn’t work with most keyboards, in 2022.

17. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Love Shortwave, hate the iPad app. Shortwave is amazing. It has the best AI assistant, particularly for things like scheduling meetings on my calendar. But the iPad app is just terrible. No keyboard shortcuts, lots of bugs and errors with windowed mode in iPadOS 26. Everything is just in one pane, rather than like the desktop/web app. Seems to operate like a scaled up iPhone app rather than an actual iPad app.

18. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

    Don't be fooled, this isn't free... I don't know how they managed to show up as a "free" app without IAPS here in the app store. But it's very misleading. This is a very limited Gmail client, where you only have access to the last 90 days of emails. If you need to see an email older than 90 days, you have to do it on Gmail, as you won't find it here. While I understand the free plan should have limitations, this shouldn't be one of them. The fact that they limit the most basic & most important feature in an email client, makes the free plan useless / pointless. They did this just to say they have a free plan but it isn't really. If you want access to any email older than 90 days, it will cost you $14 a month

19. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Please remove the cat GIFs. I like the app, but the Inbox cat images are hella annoying. Not everyone is into cats and plus, the images have nothing to do with inbox zero. They’re a turn off. At least make a way for us to disable it the feature.

20. ★★★★★search fails to find what is needed

    AI summaries, why?. I have used this app for a while. I cannot find a way to turn off the new(ish) ‘AI summary’ feature. I will be using a different email client.

21. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

    So Much Promise!!!. After years of searching for a Google Inbox replacement I found it!….only for its ridiculously expensive and non competitive pricing structure. To activate this for my work email and personal would be $15/month….$180/year. I don’t mind paying for a great app, but to put this in the perspective: Spark Mail is 1/3 the cost at $60/year and has similar bundling features, AI summary/composing, AND works with non-Gmail accounts AND has a unified inbox. Canary Mail, which although different does contain intelligent tools to achieve inbox zero, and has similar AI summary/compose features, compatibility with non-Gmail accounts, and a unified inbox ….and if I go hog-wild and buy their MacOS + iOS bundle I would still only pay $35/year…approx 1/5 the cost. (They also offer a lifetime, non-subscription option). I could go on. There are many other email app options and few touch Shortwaze’s exorbitant pricing. I want Shortwave to take my money! Even without a unified inbox or the ability to use with my iCloud email. I ask myself: if Shortwave is better…is it really 3x better than Spark? 5x better than Canary? Its good, but not THAT good.

22. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Missing badge notifications. Shortwave is the answer to what happened to Inbox and absolutely loving it. Only complaint is that I don’t receive badge notifications, I get Lock Screen notifications but no badge. Other than that it’s great keep up the good work!

23. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    No horizontal iPad support can’t delete emails. This looks to have promise but why can’t I delete emails and groups of emails like was possible with Inbox? Also there is no iPad support in horizontal mode only portrait which is horrible if you have a keyboard case.

24. ★★★★★accessibility and assistive-technology issues

    Weird email client. No settings that I can find… can’t increase text size (it’s small), can’t delete emails (archive only), not compatible w/Gmail labels. Notifications also didn’t fire. What’s the point?

25. ★★★★★mixed experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Being Replaced By Tasklet?. Over the last couple of months, Shortwave has had recurring issues, and I’m frustrated by the lack of transparency. Quotas keep being reduced or changed without clear communication—even when using the same AI models. On top of that, the app hasn’t meaningfully changed in a while beyond quota adjustments, while focus appears to be shifting to Tasklet. Is Shortwave still actively on the roadmap, or are we in maintenance mode?

26. ★★★★★mixed experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Nice idea, but not useful in practice. Was excited to see a new Inbox-like product. Unfortunately, the label/folder crossover system is clunky in practice and I found myself quickly getting frustrated when labels are applied incorrectly to incoming emails and even correctly-labeled emails are in the wrong folder. The AI is also unhelpful on mobile, as you can’t use the multi-select feature that’s available on desktop. There’s also not much evidence of responsive learning here, as the system doesn’t seem to improve regardless of how much you tweak the labeling or try to work with the chatbot. All in all a nice experiment, but it seems like the team is going too hard on AI rather than prioritizing building an actual email service.

27. ★★★★★mixed experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Missing Key Features. Would be great, but missing key features that most basic email clients have. Specifically in formatting: can’t bold or italicize text. Can’t create formatted lists. Can’t turn text into links: the only way to hyperlink is to drop the entire link into the body of the email. Has the potential to be great, but you’ve got to also master the basics.

28. ★★★★★search fails to find what is needed

    Almost Perfect…. I think Shortwave is a great email client. It has a ton of great features that I’m looking for that help me keep my email organized like split inboxes, automatic email grouping, and a great AI search that helps me find old emails quickly. I’ve mainly been using Superhuman for the last year, and I love it because it’s super clean and intuitive, but I’ve also been looking for an alternative because it’s so expensive. I’ve almost switched over to Shortwave, but a few few things have held me back: • The UI is cluttered and less intuitive. For example, to switch between email accounts, I have to reach all the way over to the left-hand side of my screen and swipe. This and the fact that the profile icon is so small, just make it feel cluttered compared to Superhuman. • I’m unable to print directly from the mobile app unless it’s a PDF file. For everything else, like if I want to print off correspondence in an email, or a receipt that’s not in a PDF format, I have to go to advance to settings, and I’m redirected to a webpage. This makes it incredibly more complicated when I quickly need to print something off for work. • And speaking of being redirected to a webpage, the same thing happens when I want to create another split inbox on my mobile app. There have been a few other bugs here and there, but other than these three main issues that I have, I think it’s overall one of the best email clients out there. If these three issues were fixed, I would switch over to Shortwave in a heartbeat.

29. ★★★★★mixed experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Good, but not great yet. If you could add other accounts such Hotmail, AOL and so on it would definitely be a great app, but currently only works with gmail. Uninstalling

30. ★★★★★excessive or broken notifications

    Great email app but missing badge notifications. UI is great and easy to use. My only complaint is the missing badge notifications for iPhone.