Google's new email client, Inbox, launched last October on the iPhone, Android, and on Chrome. It was a reimagining of how email could work — albeit with a lot of influence from other apps like Mailbox — but it was limited to just those three platforms. Most egregious is that the web version of Inbox wasn't so much a web version as it was a Chrome version, as it failed on other browsers. That situation is slightly better today, with added support for Safari and Firefox. That doesn't quite make it a fully client-agnostic web app, but it's a step in the right direction. It's also now a universal app on iOS, meaning that it should work equally well on iPads and iPhones.

Now works on iPads

There's still the matter of actually being able to use Inbox in the first place: it's following the popular trend of launching as invite-only. It still seems rather odd that a company of Google's size would feel the need to keep access to a potentially popular app limited. "We're good on servers," Inbox's product director Alex Gawley once told The Verge, so the invite system is more about trying to incentivize word of mouth than keeping things from getting overloaded. Google has been fairly liberal in doling out invites to those who want them, at least, as it's been fairly easy to score one.

Google still has work to do to make Inbox feel feature complete. The development team has previously promised to support putting emails from multiple accounts into a single view and adding other Gmail-specific features, for example. Google Inbox also doesn't work with most custom domains, so people who use Gmail for work still can't use it.

If want to give Inbox a try, Google has set up an email address for Verge readers who haven't yet gotten an invite. For the next 48 hours, if you email a request to TheVergeInbox@google.com, you should get an automatic reply with an invite.