SKIM is a small iPhone app that shows my unread Gmail as a stack of cards. I swipe right to mark one as read, left to keep it for later and up to star it, and the next card is already waiting underneath.
The reason is my inbox, which had 44,093 unread emails (most of them were never meant to be read anyway). Email is roughly 99% notifications and 1% real conversations now, but every email app is still built for reading and replying. So I wanted one that’s only for skimming.
I built it with Claude Code, and the first version was running on my phone within a day. It talks to Gmail directly from the phone with no server of mine in between, so my mail stays on my iPhone and nothing is tracked. It can only read and label mail, which means it can’t send or delete anything.
Then I started using it on my real inbox every day, and the list of ideas grew. The counter on top shows how many are left today, and a tap or swipe switches it to this week, this month and the total. To be honest, 44,093 is a terrible number to look at, but “8 left today” is fine.
The weird thing is, new mail lands behind the card you’re reading, so you’d never notice it arriving. That’s why the sync button now tells you what it found, with a little haptic and a “+2 new” sticker.
I can also pick what each swipe does, start from the oldest mail instead of the newest, and open newsletters and links inside the app. And when I swipe the wrong way, undo brings the card back, even if the change already went to Gmail.
But the part I enjoy most is the skins. Arcade is the loud yellow one with thick outlines and stickers like “READ!”, Classic looks like a familiar mail app, and Focus is near-black and quiet. They all have their own haptics, so swiping feels different in each (and even the loading screen is a SKIM logo beating like a heart).
Next up are digest notifications, so instead of a ping for every email SKIM will send something like “23 new since this morning. Time to skim?” After that come labels on the cards, more than one Gmail account and, eventually, the App Store, which needs Google to verify the app first.
For now it’s not on the App Store, and I’m still testing it on my own inbox every day. I’ll link it here when it’s ready, because apparently the fastest way through my inbox was to stop reading it.