October 24, 2017
Email remains at the heart of how companies operate. That's why earlier this year, we previewed Gmail Add-ons—a way to help businesses speed up workflows. Since then, we've seen partners build awesome applications, and beginning today, we're extending the Gmail add-on preview to include all developers. Now anyone can start building a Gmail add-on.
Gmail Add-ons let you integrate your app into Gmail and extend Gmail to handle quick actions.
They are built using native UI context cards that can include simple text dialogs, images, links, buttons and forms. The add-on appears when relevant, and the user is just a click away from your app's rich and integrated functionality.
Gmail Add-ons are easy to create. You only have to write code once for your add-on to work on both web and mobile, and you can choose from a rich palette of widgets to craft a custom UI. Create an add-on that contextually surfaces cards based on the content of a message. Check out this video to see how we created an add-on to collate email receipts and expedite expense reporting.
Per the video, you can see that there are three components to the app's core
functionality. The first component is getContextualAddOn()—this is
the entry point for all Gmail Add-ons where data is compiled to build the card
and render it within the Gmail UI. Since the add-on is processing expense
reports from email receipts in your inbox, the createExpensesCard()
parses the relevant data from the message and presents them in a form so your
users can confirm or update values before submitting. Finally,
submitForm()takes the data and writes a new row in an "expenses"
spreadsheet in Google Sheets, which you can edit and tweak, and submit for
approval to your boss.
Check out the documentation to get started with Gmail Add-ons, or if you want to see what it's like to build an add-on, go to the codelab to build ExpenseIt step-by-step. While you can't publish your add-on just yet, you can fill out this form to get notified when publishing is opened. We can't wait to see what Gmail Add-ons you build!
