Google announced two small but useful updates for Gmail on Android today: rich text formatting and instant RSVPs.
Rich text formatting has long been available for Gmail on the web, but this is the first time Google has brought it to mobile. The formatting options are pretty straightforward: You can bold, italic, underline, color and highlight text. Sadly, you still can’t link text in your messages, but having the option to at least bold text is probably all I need.
Instant RSVPs are another feature Google brought over from the web version of Gmail. Now, when you get a Google Calendar or Microsoft Exchange invite to a meeting, you can respond with one tap and your schedule will immediately pop up, as well. So instead of having to swap between different apps just to make sure you don’t have a scheduling conflict and to accept an invitation, you can now do all of this right in the Gmail app.
It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s mobile version of Outlook long included a very similar feature.
Google didn’t say when it plans to bring these features to the Gmail app for iOS, but I actually wouldn’t be surprised if we first saw them appear in Inbox instead. Indeed, given that Inbox is essentially Google’s next-gen email client, it’s surprising the company didn’t launch a feature like rich-text editing for Inbox first.