Gmail adds support for third-party add-ons

Google is launching third-party add-ons for Gmail today. These native extensions will allow you to bring the power of services like Asana, DocuSign, Trello, Wrike and others directly to your inbox — no matter whether you are an enterprise or individual user.

If you’ve been following along, this announcement doesn’t come as a total surprise. The company first announced at its I/O developer conference in March that this feature was coming. At the time, though, this was only a developer preview; since then, Google has worked with a number of partners to bring a first set of native extensions to Gmail.

This first set of partners includes Asana, Dialpad, DocuSign (coming soon), Hire (by Google), Intuit QuickBooks, ProsperWorks, RingCentral, Smartsheet, Streak, Trello and Wrike. Unsurprisingly, the focus here is on productivity services that, for the most part, already include some connection to email. The add-ons live in the right sidepane of Gmail (though sadly they are not available in Inbox by Gmail, Google’s other email client).

Asana co-founder Justin Rosenstein told me that this will allow his customers to more easily bring tasks from external emails to the work-tracking service. It also will allow Asana users to see more details about tasks that appear in emails they receive directly from Asana or from other users.

The same is true for most of the other integrations, whether that’s the Trello add-on allowing you to turn emails into actionable tasks or the RingCentral add-on allowing you to make outbound calls and view and send SMS messages from your inbox.

What’s nice is that these add-ons also work in the mobile Gmail app on Android. As for iOS support, a Google spokesperson tells me the company is “working with Apple to bring Gmail Add-ons to iOS users.” It’s unclear when exactly this will happen, though.

As somebody who heavily relies on Trello’s Chrome-based plugin for Gmail to stay semi-sane, the idea of a native integration with Gmail definitely sounds like it’ll make life easier — especially because of this mobile integration.

You can now install these integrations from the G Suite Marketplace; if you are a developer, you can also start creating add-ons for your own organization. These Gmail add-ons join similar tools for Google Docs and Sheets that are already available in the Marketplace.