So, after a few years with a Windows phone, after a short stay with Symbian preceded by a couple of years with an iPhone, I'm now going to try out an Android phone.

I've got a Moto X Pure (Style as it's known in Europe) on the way. Any tips or tricks to Android that I should be aware of? I'm a fairly typical phone user I suppose, but I do use e-mail on my phone a lot for work. Any suggested e-mail clients? I've heard Outlook is good, and might be more familiar to me as that's what I'm using now on my Windows 10 phone, but open to try out anything really.

I think this phone already has Android M available for it, is that something I should update to right away?

Anyways, I figured the friendly crowd here my have some useful info, so thanks in advance for anything you can share!

Outlook on other platforms is completely different to Windows, they bought in another app and rebranded it Outlook. It is supposed to be quite good though.

Like Andy said, Outlook on Android is an app they acquired (Acompli, I think?), but it's gotten good reviews. There are plenty of other mail clients, but I don't have experience with them as I've always been a GMail user.

Welcome to Android! It can be occasionally frustrating, but I like the platform. I'm trying to think of things I'd recommend, but given how personal these devices are, your use cases might be completely different than mine. I'm pretty deep in the Google ecosystem, so my most-used apps are usually Google apps - Calendar, Photos, Music, Maps, Drive, Hangouts, and Keep are all used daily on my phone. Here are the other apps I use:

Pocket Casts - for podcasts, and Doggcatcher is another good one

Feedly - for RSS feeds

LastPass - fantastic password manager that can fill out login info in webpages AND apps

Dropbox - I use it almost exclusively to back up my photos to my NAS, and Google Photos automatically backs them up to Google

Timely - a great alarm clock and timer app that can sync alarms across Android devices, but it was bought by Google a while back and hasn't been updated

ES File Explorer - IMO, it's the best file manager for Android

Wifi Analyzer - I use this all the time on the job to test signal strength from wireless APs and see where coverage needs to improve

Email Note to Self - all this does is bring up a new email with my own email address in the from and to fields, and the cursor in the subject line or body so I can quickly send myself an email reminder, which feeds into my inbox zero lifestyle


The first few of those apps are available cross-platform, but the last 3 or 4 are only on Android, as far as I'm aware, and some tie into capabilities that Android makes possible. WiFi Analyzer, for example, might seem like a minor app, but it's one of the things I use on a very regular basis that I can't find a comparable app for on iOS. Additionally, I believe that apps like Lastpass have more capability on Android than they do on other platforms.

A quick note on widgets:

The idea is nice, and some folks might make more use of widgets than I do, but I've never been wild about them. Most of them are pretty bad at managing how much space they take up versus the amount of information they provide.

I use the following widgets:

Direct dial and direct text a contact: puts an icon on my home screen to call one person, or an icon to text one person, and I gather these all into one folder that holds all my most frequently dialed people (pretty much just family members)

Google Keep: this one isn't that necessary, but it puts all my notes on the screen for easy and direct access, really only saving one screen tap.

Chrome Bookmark: just a link to a site. I was using this for the Wells Fargo mobile site until they finally put their app on the Nexus 5X. I still use it for Facebook because the Facebook app is a resource hog.

InControl scene shortcuts: this won't be any help to you, but I have 10 small widgets on their own screen to initiate lighting scenes on my home automation system.

Matt,

I've moved from iPhone to Android too, now two weeks ago. I bought an One Plus X. I quite like the phone, even though it's only a mid-range phone. But it's all I need really. I've set it up a bit like my iPhone (hey, I'm getting older and find I'm sticking to my habits ), even got a lock screen that resembles the iPhone, with notifications on it. Standard Android didn't have that and I found I missed it. "Echo lockscreen" is a perfect app that fixes that though. But that's not what I wanted to ask.

I've got one niggle with the standard Gmail app. I use it read my 3 Gmail addresses. This works perfectly. There's just one thing: I read my emails from my desktop using Thunderbird or simply by using the Webmail application. I also use my iPad. And before also my iPhone, now my Android phone. Now, before, when I read an email on either of these devices, the email got marked as read on all other devices too (as it should). Somehow, this doesn't work for my Android phone. When I read an email on the phone, it gets marked as read on the phone, but it's still "marked as unread" in Thunderbird, the webmail app and the iPad. This is not a huge problem, but it's annoying nonetheless.

Does this sound familiar to you, and would you happen to know about a fix for this? To me, this sounds like a simple setting, but I cannot figure out which one. A Google search comes up with some results, but no concrete solutions and most thread about this item seems to be more than 5 years old.

Sorry for hijacking this thread, but I figure the question is on topic too.

Thanks!

My first guess about your unread mail issue is maybe your new phone's mail client isn't set up to use IMAP to access the mail server. For instance maybe it's set up as POP3 or something.

Cool, thanks for the app tips! I currently use LastPass so that'll be on my list.

As for the widgets, I hopefully can find some that are useful. I fear that's the one thing I'm going to miss from Windows is the at a glance information I can get from the live tiles.

One thing none of my "android" friends can confirm for me is something I make use of a lot currently. For my work e-mail I have multiple subfolders setup (hosted by my work's exchange server). I have a few of these subfolders pined to my home screen so I can very quickly see this there's mail there. Otherwise the main icon on the screen won't let me know that I've received any mail. Does that make sense? Is this possible?

Thanks Tony. This was my guess too, but I can't find where this can be set. In any case, in gmail itself, both imap and pop3 are active (I need pop3 too because I use it to pull the contents of two of those accounts to the first one - this was never a problem in the past with my iPhone).

I'll admit, those live tiles are nice. There are certainly widgets that will accomplish some of the same things, but it's not going to be as cohesive. It's more customizable, but finding just the right tool might be trickier.


I'm sorry to say that I'm another Android friend who doesn't know if that will work. It really depends on how MS has written the available widgets for the Outlook app, which is probably what you'll be using for your Exchange account.

Each app is responsible for its own widgets, which get installed/uninstalled with the app. If they haven't created a widget like that, then maybe another email handling app has done so. You'll need to find one that supports Exchange.


I'll be honest, I'm not sure what to make of that setup. I don't know how that even works. On the phone's side, it's not really possible to have messages from a POP3 account brought into an IMAP account. I might not be understanding your setup, though.

To recap, all three accounts you're checking on your phone are GMail accounts, correct? I assume that you have a primary account, which is the one that your phone is using across the various Google services you're using. If all 3 of your accounts are GMail accounts, and you want to have your 2 secondary accounts send their emails to your primary account, this would normally be done within GMail on the web, by forwarding the email from each of those two accounts to your primary account. Then you'd simply have a single inbox on all your devices.

If you want separate inboxes for each account, then there shouldn't be any kind of bringing email from those two accounts into the primary, so I'm just confused again.

I think I need to understand your goals a little better.

My most recent experience on Android was with a Samsung Galaxy S4, and my biggest recommendation is to immediately root the thing and figure out how to rip out all the useless crap that comes pre-installed on the phone.

Once I jettisoned the voluminous pile o' lameness that came with it, it turned out to be a decent phone.

I guess I'll find out soon! I'll try to replicate that as best I can. If I figure out a way I'll post it here.

That's one reason I went with the Moto X Pure. It's almost stock Android, with what are supposedly just a few, well reviewed changes.

"Nine" for an Exchange client is my pick. Actively developed and new features are being added all the time. Costs $10 though but you can try for 14 days for free.

For a regular Google account the normal GMail app works just fine for me too.

Lots of other apps though:

Dropbox I concur. Great for photo backup amongst other things.

I like Google Keep for simple notes and reminders (along with location based alerts)

Tasker allows lots of control of things based on events or states of the phone allowing customisation in a lot of detail.

PassWallet allows the use of Apple passbook .pbk files for boarding passes etc.

JuiceSSH for an SSH client.

RealCalc for a good scientific calculator.

Most of these I use paid versions. For that matter Google Rewards gives you free credit for some survey answers (you don't have to always answer correctly )

Ok, I can understand why my setup may be confusing. This is the case:
I have 3 Gmail accounts. The main account is actually my domain account, which is coupled to Gmail, so it's essentially a Gmail account as well. The other two are "true" Gmail accounts. (@gmail.com)

I import the mail from the two @gmail.com accounts into my main domain account, in a specific subfolder. I do this to be able to see all my incoming mail in ONE account. Why? Because at work I can only log into my mail via webmail. By using the browser, I can only log into one Gmail account at a time. By logging into my main account and having it import the mail of both @gmail.com accouts, I have a nice overview of ALL my new mail, on one screen. (my webmail screen is always open at work)

For the import I use the "check mail from other accounts using POP3" option that is built into Gmail. It's for this reason I have POP3 enabled on the @gmail.com accounts. If I wouldn't need the import of the mail into the main account, I would disable POP3 entirely and only use IMAP (now they are both enabled).

Now, this is my setup. With my iPhone, I only needed to also configure my main account, because the mail of the other accounts would also automatically show up (imported). This was very handy. (I would also have configured the other two @gmail accounts if I would have liked, but I found the email client of iOS not very handy to deal with multiple email accounts - so I only used the main account) When I read a mail on my iPhone from my main account, it was always "marked as read" (of course) This also immediately showed up like so on my computer's webmail, Thunderbird, etc. (like it should be)

Now, with Android, and its much better Gmail integration, I saw the opportunity to not only configure only the main email account, but also both @gmail accounts. (the Android client is better at this than iOS's email client is). Another reason: Android also allows for push mail with Gmail (which the iPhone client did not, not anymore anyway), so I figured I'd configure all three accounts this time.

This works very well, EXCEPT for the fact that mail read on my Android phone does NOT show up as "read" on my desktop's Thunderbird or the webmail app. It's like the Android app doesn't tell the mail server the mail was read.

I cannot find any setting to configure this. I'm sure my sync settings are on (all the rest works fine, calendar synching etc...)

Does this make it more clear to you?
Hmmm...I just got to thinking that my setup with the imported mail isn't all that important in this case. I'm pretty sure the problem would be the same if this would just be a plain vanilla Gmail account. I was going to edit this reply, but then just figured I'd leave it be for completeness...

Anyway: do you recognise this problem? Maybe know a solution for it?

Thanks!

Does the problem go away if you remove the other two Gmail accounts from your Andriod phone configuration and only have it accessing the 'main' Gmail account?

That's the reason I never recommend Samsung phones. I can't stand TouchWiz, it's just the worst.

Fortunately the two phones discussed in this thread so far (the Moto X and the OnePlus) won't have that issue. For the most part they're pretty close to stock, especially the Moto.

I'm still a little confused, but let me try to address some things:

When you say "The main account is actually my domain account, which is coupled to Gmail," what does that mean? Does that mean it's a Google Apps account? Or are you just set up on your web host to forward emails to a domain you own to a GMail account? For example, you own archeon.com, and have set up [email protected] to forward to [email protected]. You may never use [email protected], instead sending and receiving from GMail as [email protected] and just using GMail for mail handling. Naturally, the best way to do such a thing would be to pay $50 a year for Google Apps and truly integrate your domain with GMail through MX and SRV records, but then it isn't free.

Am I close on this part?

The other part is about using GMail account A to check GMail accounts B and C through POP. Naturally, this will work, but probably isn't ideal. Regardless, it would be helpful to know how this part is set up in order to fix your issue. When GMail account A checks B and C, are you telling it to leave a copy when it retrieves the mail?

If I were in your situation, I would log into all three accounts in my browser separately and then switch between them in one tab, or open one tab for each inbox. That would keep the accounts separate.

On Android, I think you want to handle things very differently than you are now. First, K447's suggestion would be the one I'd jump to immediately. From the description of your setup, it sounds like account A is already getting emails from B and C, but you've also set up your phone to get emails directly from accounts B and C. If those connections are POP, then it makes sense that your read status isn't synced because that's impossible with POP.

But this still leaves me confused, because it sounds like you should be seeing double emails on your phone. Account A would get emails from accounts B and C, and accounts B and C are pulling email to the phone separately.

One more thought:

One source of confusion might be the idea that accounts B and C need to be setup through POP or IMAP at all. They don't, and should be set up as Google accounts. You go to Settings > Accounts > Add Account > Google (not "Personal (IMAP)" for example). Enter your gmail address for account B or C and the password and you're set.

Now when you go into the GMail app, swipe from the left and at the top you switch to the new account. After that, you'll have an option for "All Inboxes" that will display a unified inbox.

You can also create GMail widgets on your home screen that will take you to a specific account's inbox or any other label.

This process would, however, require that you stop checking B and C via POP from account A. You'll be seeing double, otherwise.

*edit*
Of course, before following the instructions above, you'd want to remove the old entries for accounts B and C.

Does this widget app look like it will accomplish what you want?

I just got the phone tonight. It's updating to Marshmallow now so once that's done and I get things sorted out I'll try it out and report back. I'm going to install Outlook first and see how that goes.

Thanks and Happy New Year!

Congrats and Happy New Year to you too! And everyone!

My number one advice is to UNLOCK THE BOOTLOADER if possible. Do this NOW, before you customize anything, because unlocking it will ERASE the phone back to factory state (more or less).

Unlocking the bootloader is usually a requirement before a phone can be "rooted", which is something you WILL want to do eventually, so best to unlock it now. On a Google Nexus or OnePlus phone, this is as simple as typing "fastboot oem unlock" on a connected PC.

The downside of unlocking, is that it makes it easier for a thief (eg. USA border guard) to access the contents of the phone. You decide.

"rooting" an Android phone sounds scary, but all it really means is "installing a sudo command (app)". This is just like on (eg. Unbuntu) Linux PCs, where one is frequently typing "sudo" in front of privileged commands to run them as root. Except the Android equivalent is a lot more convenient.

I got that widget, but it apparently only supports actual gmail accounts. My work account doesn't appear in the widget.

This is really something I'm going to have to work on. I get way to many e-mails a day and ready access and at a glance info is critical to me. I'm sure there's a solution I just need to find it!

Hmm, this is something I might consider, but what are the benefits? I haven't really done much with the phone yet besides just load a few apps.

The only benefit of unlocking the bootloader, is that the phone can then be rooted at will without any repercussions. The bootloader can also be re-locked at will, though that kinda defeats the purpose.

Benefits of rooting? Well, this gives the ability to customize things beyond what the maker (and google) might normally permit.

Eg. Better Ad-Blocking. UI customizations. Titanium Backup (the best backup/restore app on Android), etc..

Note that rooting can prevent some applications working. In Australia the sole cable TV provider's application for watching live TV using your home subscription will not work on a jailbroken iPhone or a rooted Android phone/tab.

There are Xposed plugins to defeat stuff like that, dunno if they work or not.

But such restrictions are incredibly rare right now. Google Wallet payments in the USA is another, I believe.

Does rooting also allow any app you run su privileges ? Or are you prompted when an app wants to run something as root ?

That's the way it works. The prompt allows DENY, PERMIT-ONCE, PERMIT-ALWAYS, and has various controls/menus for tweeking things.

I tried that just now, and that indeed seems to have fixed it. Very strange!!

I'm now using my phone exactly the way I used my iPhone: one main account, which in the background imports the mail from the other gmail accounts and puts that mail in subfolders. This works for me of course, 'cause it has worked for 5 years like that before on the iPhone. But I do think it's a pity I cannot enter the other accounts directly, since that would have allowed me push mail on the other accounts as well. No biggie, but this seems like a bug to me.