The maddeningly familiar march of Google's Gmail-Meet marriage

If you use Gmail from your Android phone, brace yourself: You’re in for an obnoxious surprise.

There’s a chance you’ve already gotten it, in fact — and if you haven’t, rest assured: You will soon. The surprise is the arrival of a new on-screen menu that lives in your inbox and takes up a fair portion of the vertical scrolling space there. Its sole purpose? Why, putting a prominent link to Google Meet in your face at all times, of course.

Yes, really — an entire screen-width toolbar that’s plastered onto your inbox simply to hold two oversized options: Mail and Meet. Like so much of what we’ve experienced in this exhausting year, it almost feels more like satire than reality, like something someone on the internet would’ve come up with as a joke (“Hey, didja see how Google’s gonna try to force us all to use Meet next?! LOL!~”).

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