Why Canary Mail is the best email app for iPhone, iPad & iOS

Email on iPhone is tricky – there’s a large amount of data to be parsed within a set of strict constraints – screen size, battery & bandwidth use, and variable connectivity. With Canary, we faced the additional challenge of translating the amazing design, performance and feature set of our Mac client to our iOS mail app.

As we’ve described in our rationale for developing the best Mac mail app, in our view, the best email app for iPhone & iPad should also have:

• Seamless email encryption, similar to how WhatsApp does it for chat
• Productivity-enhancing features such as read-tracking, snooze, follow-up reminders, smart bulk mail handling, and smart inbox filters, optimized for iOS
• Natural language search which works on emails, attachments, and contacts
• Minimal server footprint, with the option to store zero personal data on 3rd party servers
• Universal IMAP support, including Gmail, Yahoo, Office 365, iCloud, FastMail, etc
• A beautiful design and user experience that makes dealing with today’s email volumes as effortless as possible, especially on the iPhone, but also optimized for iPad

Additionally, there’s also the challenge of delivering push notifications securely, which all apps including Outlook, Spark, Airmail, Edison Mail, Newton Mail, etc must deal with – we’ve described this in detail here. So like Apple Mail, we decided to give users the option to switch to Fetch – where email is fetched from and stored directly on the device, with a small delay in new notifications.

Finally, we wanted to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance certain functionality and make our iPhone mail app even more effortless to use. While apps like Trove and Astro also offer some of these features, what’s special about Canary is that the AI is built into the app – we don’t send user data over the internet to be parsed on remote servers. This enhances security, performance, and reduces bandwidth and battery use.

With Canary Mail for iOS, we believe we’ve achieved something unprecedented – cutting-edge PGP security in an app that’s beautifully designed and feature-rich. We truly think this is the best email app for iPhone & iPad on the market today, and continue to work hard to improve it even further.

Canary for iOS is free to try – we’d love it if you tell us what you think: @CanaryMailApp