Canary Mail

Can it do better than Apple Mail?

$9.99 From Mailr Tech, canarymail.io Made For iPhone, iPad, Watch Needs iOS 9 or later

Email on a tiny smartwatch sounds like a lamebrain idea and works about as well as you would expect with most watchOS apps. Even the built-in Mail app offers fairly limited functionality — more often than not you’ll see the dreaded “The full version of this message isn’t available on Apple Watch” warning instead of the actual text of your email.

Third-party email client Canary Mail recently threw its hat into the Apple Watch ring, and the results are decidedly mixed. On the plus side, the watchOS app provides a much better preview of incoming missives, showing up to 10 lines of text compared to a mere four on the native Mail app. Canary Mail even manages to extract preview text from emails which Apple Mail won’t even bother attempting to display.

The developers have branded their watchOS app with a beta tag, and that’s probably with good reason — we couldn’t get it working at all on our firstgeneration Apple Watch. The app did load, but the list of mail accounts never appeared, even after multiple attempts to uninstall and/or reboot the connected devices; we had better luck installing the app on a Series 1 model.

One feature that makes Canary Mail particularly intriguing for owners of Apple Watch Series 3 is that email can be fetched over LTE, the first time such a feature has been implemented into a third-party email watchOS app. You can also compose replies with the usual triple play of scribble, quick reply, or voice dictation methods.

the bottom line. Considering the beta tag, Canary Mail for watchOS is off to a promising start — it’s a shame it doesn’t work well on first-gen Watch models, though. Hopefully things will improve as the app matures.