This startup lets Gmail plugins run on your phone

Photo credit: Pabak Sarkar.

Gmail on computers is dynamic. There are plugins that let messages self-destruct within five minutes of being read and others that track whether people have opened your emails.

Gmail on smartphones… not so much.

Aishwarya Jain figured that it was a long shot to expect Google to find a way for these plugins to work successfully in the Gmail mobile app. The mail client isn’t entirely to blame – along with challenges of security and efficiency, providing ways for people to interact differently with their emails might ignite a behavioral change that would signify the death of email.

Instead, he decided to figure it out himself. Along with Akshay Katyal, his friend and co-worker at HackerEarth, he launched Strike.

The Strike app for Android allows the Gmail app to use an array of plugins. At first, the startup focused on its “people” and its “snooze” features, which meant that users could search public social information of any email address and mute important emails until they wanted to see them.

Recently, it launched a private beta version that works with Highrise, a customer relationship management (CRM) software that helps manage contacts and organize conversations. Strike lets users do everything they usually would with their Highrise account, except while browsing their Gmail mobile app. This means that an email can be immediately converted into a task, filed away, and adjusted so only certain people can see it.

In the next release, Aishwarya and Akshay plan to include Salesforce capabilities, a tracker to check when people have read emails, and an extension that creates calendar events while in the mail app. They are also testing a version with Sugar, a tool that manages sales, customer service, and marketing processes.

Take advantage of bad blood

Photo credit: Tsahi Levent-Levi.

Strike’s vision is much broader than what the founders initially had in mind. “At first, we just wanted to find an easy way integrate Rapportive [a desktop service that lets people see public LinkedIn profiles associated with email addresses] into mobile phones,” Aishwarya explains.

“Once we built that out, we realized how challenging it was for independent apps to run simultaneously on mobile phones. Every app works in a sandboxed mode.” Sandboxed apps are those that are run in a strict environment, usually for the sake of preventing unverified third parties from accessing their backend technology and stealing code. “That’s why we decided to develop our own SDK that we give away to businesses.”